In Internet years, AOL has grown long in the tooth and seems incapable of playing nice with the toys it buys. There is a great deal of execution risk in putting old and new brands together. Even now, many of the longtime editorial employees at AOL have been laid off to make way for Huffington Post staff, while many of the unpaid contributors to Huffington Post have been vocal about the fact that the site cashed in, but they still work free.

It hasn’t helped matters that AOL has changed strategies as often as Lady Gaga switches out sunglasses, including the much-hated “AOL Way,” a leaked document that suggested that the company was far more interested in mass-produced link-bait than building and supporting unique publishing brands.

Mr. Bankoff, who has spent 17 years in digital publishing, has lived the cycle of the joyous press release and the bold predictions and he has seen the ensuing culture clash up close.

“It is very difficult to build community or authority as a generalist or a portal,” he said. “I saw firsthand how talent can be squandered and enthusiasm deflated when people aren’t given the tools, trust or time to do their jobs.”

At first blush, SB Nation would seem to be an odd home for a gadget blog — the Venn diagram intersection between geeks and jocks usually is defined by the Madden NFL games. The site grew out of a group of fan sites, most centered on individual teams, that was first created by, among others, Markos Moulitsas, the political blogger who had a great deal of success with The Daily Kos.

Mr. Bankoff, who came on board in 2009, moved aggressively to expand both individual team sites and regional sites with $23.5 million in backing from Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital. SB Nation now has over 300 sports fan sites and just opened a national site called Baseball Nation, which includes Rob Neyer, a longtime baseball writer for ESPN.com. According to Quantcast, the site has more than doubled its traffic in the last year, to over 10 million unique visitors a month.

It’s a cluttered market, with ESPN.com, daily newspaper sites and even media from the teams themselves, but Mr. Bankoff likes building new sites without having to ask for the kind of permissions required at a big publicly held company.