Grantland

» see grantland.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2011 i was twenty-seven and working out of ankara as a computer engineer. grantland was a sports-and-pop-culture website espn launched that june, edited by an american sportswriter named bill simmons whose audience was overwhelmingly nba fans. the site never really crossed over into turkey. nba coverage in turkish media at the time tracked hedo türkoğlu and mehmet okur, while grantland was writing 4,000-word essays about the lakers' triangle offense or the second round of the eastern conference playoffs. there was no overlap.

what grantland actually was: a longform sports and pop-culture publication built around bill simmons, then espn's biggest individual byline. simmons had been pitching some version of it inside espn for years. it launched june 8 2011 with a writers list anchored by chuck klosterman and malcolm gladwell, with specialists like zach lowe writing on basketball. the contracts were generous by online-magazine standards. the editorial model was simple: give smart writers more space than anyone else online would and trust the audience to read 5,000 words about a basketball coach.

the actual readership was concentrated among american sports nerds in their late twenties through forties. it was the kind of site that turned into shorthand among a specific demographic of journalists, with bill simmons's nba columns and the bs podcast as the inbound funnel. for me sitting in ankara it was an occasional click through to a chuck klosterman piece about a 90s rock band, not a daily destination. for its core audience it was the most-quoted cultural reference of the early 2010s sports internet.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

espn signed simmons to a roughly $7 million per year contract in 2011 partly to keep him from leaving for rival outlets and partly to fund the launch of his pet project. grantland came out of the gate with a small full-time editorial team backed by a much larger pool of named contributors and a substantial editorial budget. early traffic was modest by espn standards but the engagement metrics were strong. the average grantland reader spent two to three times longer per session than the average espn.com reader.

the writing did its job. the site won a national magazine award for digital media in 2014 for an investigation by caleb hannan into a putter inventor named dr. v. it became a near-mandatory read for nba journalists. it incubated the post-blog generation of sports writers who later built the ringer and the athletic. names like jonah keri and rembert browne built their reputations on grantland bylines.

~ what really happened ~

simmons had a long history of public friction with espn management, especially over his coverage of nfl commissioner roger goodell during the 2014 ray rice scandal. espn suspended him for three weeks in september 2014 after he called goodell "a liar" on his podcast. relations did not recover. in may 2015 espn announced it would not renew simmons's contract when it expired in september. simmons left immediately and went public with his frustration.

grantland stayed open for another five months under managing editor chris ryan, but the editorial momentum was clearly gone. several writers followed simmons out the door over the summer. john skipper, then president of espn, announced the shutdown on october 30 2015 in a memo. the official reason was that grantland "no longer made business sense" without simmons. inside the building the reading was that espn never figured out how to operate a longform site without the personality the entire model had been built around.

~ what got buried with it ~

the archive went down years later in an unrelated espn cms migration around 2020, which meant the back catalog of zach lowe nba essays and grantland quarterly features became unreadable. the internet archive captured most of it. some former staff have since rebuilt mirror collections on third-party sites. the loss was bigger than the original shutdown because the actual writing was the part of grantland that had any chance of surviving its corporate context.

simmons launched the ringer in march 2016 with a substantial chunk of the former grantland staff plus a slightly different model centered on podcasts. the spotify acquisition in 2020 put the ringer firmly on the audio side of media. defector launched the same year with much of the old deadspin staff using a similar editorial-collective approach. the longform sports-and-culture publication model grantland had built clearly worked. espn just decided in 2015 it did not want to run one anymore.

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