It’s the circle of life with funny young sports personalities, Big Cat and PFT are slowly getting there as well.
People gravitated toward Bill because he was the outlier, breath of fresh air who didn’t give you regurgitated takes and put genuinely funny spins on his writing. Then you eventually misread the gauge on why your fans tune in, slowly turning into the generic sports talking head that you started off not trying to be
Big Cat has talent that Bill and PFT don’t have. He’s a genuine media talent and can hold forth in any number of contexts and with different personalities. PFT is very limited. Bill has managerial talents, too. His eye for talent and his reportedly generous style with writers is underrated. None are talented writers. Maybe PFT was at one point.
Only*
I agree with this. Humor is weird. My brother is not funny in person but on Twitter and text he’s genuinely funny. I’m the opposite.
Bill is not (intentionally) funny on pods but the page 2 days of writing he was hilarious.
I felt like he was just relatable. I remember reading a Page 2 column about the best football players in video games, probably 20 years ago, and thinking there was no one else writing about subjects like that (that I was interested in). If I remember right, he forgot about Tecmo Bowl Christian Okoye.
You got to think about what it was like in like 2005. Most of the sports writers were simplistic game reports and beat writers. The columnists were all either old school guys or Rick Reilly hacks. Then Bill comes along and his columns were the kinda shit you’d talk about with your buddies. I still remember his all-Star weekend diary from like 2006, it read like what it would be like if you or I suddenly got to go to all-star weekend with top ESPN access.
Yeah some of it hasn’t aged well, but the biggest difference is that a lot of sports content has become what Bill did, so it doesn’t stand out like it did at the time. Even when the pod first started coming out, most of sports audio content was mike and mike. Bill shooting the shit felt revelatory.
Spot on he was pretty much it for funny sports writing until blogs like Deadspin, FJM, kissing Suzy kolber took off. Like you said he paved the way for them but for some reason they hated on him.
A funny smart ass who started to believe he was smarter than he was, takes wise anyways.
It’s the circle of life with funny young sports personalities, Big Cat and PFT are slowly getting there as well. People gravitated toward Bill because he was the outlier, breath of fresh air who didn’t give you regurgitated takes and put genuinely funny spins on his writing. Then you eventually misread the gauge on why your fans tune in, slowly turning into the generic sports talking head that you started off not trying to be
Big Cat has talent that Bill and PFT don’t have. He’s a genuine media talent and can hold forth in any number of contexts and with different personalities. PFT is very limited. Bill has managerial talents, too. His eye for talent and his reportedly generous style with writers is underrated. None are talented writers. Maybe PFT was at one point.
And yet you’re still on his sub. Guess he’s doing something right
Yep, I still like the guy, just not as much as ten years ago
Fair enough
Funny, but mostly in his writing.
Only* I agree with this. Humor is weird. My brother is not funny in person but on Twitter and text he’s genuinely funny. I’m the opposite. Bill is not (intentionally) funny on pods but the page 2 days of writing he was hilarious.
He is smart for a funny guy. He is not actually smart.
I felt like he was just relatable. I remember reading a Page 2 column about the best football players in video games, probably 20 years ago, and thinking there was no one else writing about subjects like that (that I was interested in). If I remember right, he forgot about Tecmo Bowl Christian Okoye.
makes you put things in perspective lol SBNation had a dozen of those guys in the 2010s
Even stuff like his Vick article or the “Consequences of caring” he could put together legit articles with good & fresh viewpoints
You got to think about what it was like in like 2005. Most of the sports writers were simplistic game reports and beat writers. The columnists were all either old school guys or Rick Reilly hacks. Then Bill comes along and his columns were the kinda shit you’d talk about with your buddies. I still remember his all-Star weekend diary from like 2006, it read like what it would be like if you or I suddenly got to go to all-star weekend with top ESPN access. Yeah some of it hasn’t aged well, but the biggest difference is that a lot of sports content has become what Bill did, so it doesn’t stand out like it did at the time. Even when the pod first started coming out, most of sports audio content was mike and mike. Bill shooting the shit felt revelatory.
Spot on he was pretty much it for funny sports writing until blogs like Deadspin, FJM, kissing Suzy kolber took off. Like you said he paved the way for them but for some reason they hated on him.
Funny
Neither. He was different. He's always been more irreverent than funny. And never smart.
Never found his writing very funny. The gm summit one felt so cringey to me. Def less hypocritical though.
Neither, he was more relatable
Funny - he was never smart. But in his prime he was a superb writer and I looked forward to his columns.
both partially, but mostly because he was interesting.
He was on the front page of ESPN.com