I'm excited to see what Simmons and his team have put together, and I'll be watching closely for at least a few weeks. But I get a little excited about every new media launch. Don't read into it. In fact, I think the new site is doomed, and I suspect ESPN's executives will recognize that in only a month or two even if they refuse to admit it until millions of dollars have been spent.

There are three major issues here and, taken together, they comprise all that there is to Grantland, except for maybe the design and the hardware on which the content is built; those servers, once scraped clean of Simmons's columns, will go on to host another site, perhaps one that stands a better chance. The problems: Bill Simmons, ESPN and the team that Bill Simmons and ESPN have assembled.

Bill Simmons

Grantland's official launch is in the future, not the past, but already Simmons himself is a little tired of the work. "It hasn't been as much fun as I had thought," he told Jonathan Mahler for a profile in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine. "I'm not sure I would do it again." Do what again? He hasn't done anything yet.



We should have expected this. Bill Simmons doesn't hold anything back -- on the page or in an interview with Mahler. If he's bored, he's going to let you know about it. (In an interesting aside in the profile, Simmons is told by his publicist not to tweet out a crack about Osama bin Laden -- "'We killed Osama and the Lakers in one week?' he suggested. 'Too far?'" The tweet isn't sent. But, of course, Simmons and his publicist had this exchange in front of a reporter knowing that it would make it into print. There, not all of his 1.4 million Twitter followers will see it, but many of them will. Maybe a few will even copy/paste that passage into their AOL email accounts and pass it around like a chain letter, a method that Simmons's early fans used in order to bypass the paywall his columns were published behind.)

Later in that same New York Times Magazine profile Mahler compares Grantland to Martha Stewart Living, "a magazine similarly constructed around a single person's market-tested sensibility." But a more apt comparison might be to the new Huffington Post as detailed in a scathing feature story by Forbes' Jeff Bercovici that dropped yesterday. "There was a bucking bronco whenever someone said, 'No, you can't do that,'" Greg Coleman, formerly chief revenue officer for Huffington Post, told Bercovici about Arianna Huffington, the site's founder and editor-in-chief. "'I know Arianna very well,' he continues. 'She wanted three things: a big bag of gold, a big fat contract, which she deserved, and ... unilateral decision making over her world. And that is where you're going to have some problems. Arianna hates to be managed."

So, too, does Bill Simmons. Mahler, who is clearly a long-time fan of Simmons and his work, even highlights the columnist's "rebellious teenager" side. In the past, Simmons has stopped work for the site and created his own blog, where he posted "at least one unedited version of his column." He's also taken to Twitter to call "the hosts of an ESPN-affiliate radio show 'deceitful scumbugs.'" That outburst led to ESPN temporarily suspending Simmons's Twitter account.