Bill Simmons: Does ESPN's Popular Sportswriter Still Matter?

The most influential sportswriter of this generation is Bill Simmons. Featuring a unique writing style and enjoying the bully pulpit of writing for E-S-P-N, Bill Simmons has a legion of fans who copy his style, use his phrases and generally want to be him. The impact of Bill Simmons can be seen in virtually any sportswriter under 30 and several more who are older than that.

Of course no one can be this popular without having a host of detractors. Put the phrase "Bill Simmons sucks" into Google and you will get over 366,000 results. My favorite negative Bill Simmons entry is the Bill Simmons column generator in which you fill in roughly 50 responses and the program spits out your very own Bill Simmons-like column.

Bill Simmons built his reputation as the voice of the fan. He wrote columns that fans would write, tackled subjects no mainstream writer would (I believe he was the first to talk about Anna Kournikova not being of legal age) and lived and died with his teams. He also included pop culture references from the current decade, which made Chris Berman's references to the 60s and 70s look even more dated.

He was a 21st Century success story.

As a society, we enjoy creating heroes almost as much as we enjoy tearing them apart. Bill Simmons is still one of the top columnists around today, but you are much more likely to hear people bad mouth him today than you would five years ago. Is this trashing of Bill Simmons a reaction to his popularity of is it a reflection on his style?

Very few people will admit to hating someone/something because it is popular. Yet I don't think we can discount this phenomenon. Still, I think the majority of backlash against Bill Simmons is due to his actual performance.

When Bill Simmons burst onto the scene, hardly anybody was doing his voice of the fan schtick, certainly no one at a national level. Part of the beauty of that routine was that the teams he was following were good enough to be interesting but not so good to be threatening. If he had been writing about the Yankees during their 1996-2001 run, he would not have been nearly as entertaining.

But the Patriots and Red Sox turned into World Champions and the "living and dying" ratio got skewed much too much to the "living" side of the equation. Certainly, this is not Bill Simmons' fault, but when he's gloating and fans of those two franchises are coming out of the woodwork to gloat, eventually you reach a saturation point. With the Red Sox in 2004, we zoomed past saturation, didn't even stop at overkill and went directly to completely unbearable for the rest of the country. This certainly causes some of the resentment.

Another factor hurting Bill Simmons is that he has painted himself into a corner with his pop culture references. It was one thing when someone fresh out of college was talking about 90210 and MTV reality shows. But he is pushing 40 (if not there already) and as a forty-something myself, I feel dirty whenever I'm flipping channels and I just pass by MTV. I can't imagine watching an entire program on that network and so I feel embarrassed for Bill Simmons and his MTV references. I just can't figure out if he's doing it because this is what he really likes or if it's what his fans (and more importantly, his editors) demand from him. And I don't need any more Rocky references, either. It was great when he first came out with it, but now it's as dated as anything Berman does.

Another problem that many have with Bill Simmons is that he's no analyst. I do not doubt his passion and I do not doubt that he is informed, especially about the NBA, the Red Sox and Patriots. But those are different things from competent analysis. He built his reputation as voice of the fan and now he wants to be taken (somewhat) seriously as an analyst. His recent take on the Chris Chambers trade was simply embarrassing. Here's what Bill Simmons said:

Thank God the NFL doesn't work like fantasy and San Diego couldn't steal Chambers away for a measly second-round pick simply because Miami wanted to take a dump on their fans, tank their season and preserve the legacy of the '72 Dolphins. Because that would suck.

Chambers has been an underachiever for years. In his six full seasons in the league, he has exactly one 1,000-yard receiving campaign. Last year he had four touchdowns and this year he has none. That the Dolphins were able to swing an in-season trade for him and get a second-round pick is a coup for them. Remember, Bill Simmons' Patriots only had to give up a fourth-round pick for Randy Moss.

Bill Simmons trying to be an analyst reminds me of when Monday Night Football hired Dennis Miller. The problem didn't come from Miller's humor, the problem came when he started talking about his meetings with Dave Campo and tried analyzing third-down play calls.

And still others point to him losing his season-long battle with his wife on picking NFL games versus the spread as the thing that soured them on Bill Simmons. How were we supposed to take him seriously when his wife picked teams based on if she had friends who lived in their home cities and ended up with a better record than he did? I have no doubt it was embarrassing for Bill Simmons personally but it may have been even worse professionally.

Yet, with all of those things I remain a fan. I included Bill Simmons on my list of must-read sportswriters. He really is an excellent writer and I have read everything posted by him at the Worldwide Leader this year. Just because I recognize the faults that others see in him does not mean I don't appreciate his many talents.

I am curious to see what the next couple of years hold for Bill Simmons. I cannot see him continuing with his current gig and he does not have the typical vocal chops one associates with a TV personality. But whatever he does, I'll be along for the ride.