In the five short months since ESPN president John Skipper bounced Grantland founder and boss Bill Simmons out of ESPN, many on the Grantland staff have experienced five long months of chaos and aftershock. Last week saw the exodus of five key Grantland editorial figures, and that followed the departure in September of Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Wesley Morris, who just last year, turned down a job offer from The New York Times to continue working at Simmons’s side. Morris is now critic at large at The New York Times.

If that wasn’t enough, multiple sources have confirmed that one of the staffers who left, deputy editor Sean Fennessey, was offered Simmons’s old job as Grantland’s editor in chief, the post currently held by Chris Connelly. Fennessey turned ESPN down, deciding instead to join Simmons in a new digital venture, along with other ex-Grantlanders Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin, and Chris Ryan. Dan Fierman also left to serve as vice president and editorial director of MTV News.

For an ESPN management team that has been struggling to find the right moves in the aftermath of the Simmons explosion, Fennessy’s “thanks but no thanks” has to be a frustrating, and arguably humiliating, rejection. Despite declarations of support from Bristol Central, it leaves Grantland facing more uncertainty than ever.

Discussions on background with Grantland staffers past and present (ESPN executives associated with Grantland declined to talk on the record or on background for this column) reveal that the site is beset by a climate of fear, a cycle of mistrust, and a belief amongst several that staff are “treated like children.” An overall lack of communication with management has been beyond frustrating for the staff. Many heard about Connelly’s appointment on their Twitter feeds—precisely where Simmons had learned of his dismissal.

Since its 2011 founding, Grantland has served as a channel for Simmons to expand the Grantland staff’s distinctive point of view to journalism and criticism, a no-fear zone within the ESPN empire. That privileged position can safely be considered history. There is fear now, not only for the survival of the staff—with still more departures rumored imminent—but also for the survival of Grantland itself, unthinkable as that may have seemed even a year ago. Staff-wide angst continues to grow despite a Herculean effort by ESPN to dispense metrics suggesting traffic on the site is stronger than ever, implicitly arguing that Simmons’s departure had little effect on the almighty numbers.