

(AP Photo/ESPN Images, Don Juan Moore)

On Friday, Sports Business Daily’s John Ourand wrote a thorough tick-tock about ESPN’s decision to suspend columnist Bill Simmons without pay after he called NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a liar in a podcast. Noteworthy for its behind-the-scenes look at the decision-making process in Bristol, Ourand ends his story with a bit of informed speculation about Simmons’s future with the network:

Simmons’ contract is up next year, and ESPN clearly wants to renew the deal. It is believed that Simmons wants to stay with the company, too. But it will be interesting to see whether this suspension derails those talks.

This passage prompted a Twitter response from John “JackO” O’Connell, a longtime friend of Simmons who often appears on his podcasts. After paraphrasing Ourand’s words, he tweeted the following:

I've known Bill since we were 18 years old. That is the funniest thing anyone has ever written about him. — John O'Connell (@jacko2323) September 26, 2014

O’Connell didn’t say which part of Ourand’s passage so amused him, the part about ESPN wanting to keep its marquee name or the belief that Simmons wants to stay with the network. But in light of recent events, it’s hard to imagine it’s anything but the latter and raises questions about whether Simmons will explore his future options.

Notably: Will Bill Simmons leave ESPN when his contract is up next year?

Simmons’s relationship with the network, which began in 2001 when he was hired to write columns for ESPN.com, has been rocky, “dysfunctionally codependent,” as Jonathan Mahler of the New York Times Magazine wrote in 2011. He had been suspended from Twitter twice previously, in 2009 for bashing ESPN radio affiliate WEEI in Boston and in 2013 after calling a “First Take” segment between Richard Sherman and Skip Bayless “awful and embarrassing.”

Could the suspension be the final straw for Simmons, whose contract with the network expires next year?

On the surface, there are two questions at play here: How much does ESPN need Simmons, and how much does Simmons need ESPN? Let’s tackle the former first.

Simmons’s Twitter feed has 2.92 million followers, and many of those followers equate to guaranteed clicks on Simmons’s Grantland columns and podcasts (and, for that matter, on any ESPN.com feature that Simmons tweets out). The network would risk losing those followers — and, as the #freesimmons movement shows, it already has done a pretty good job of alienating them — should Simmons take his act elsewhere.

But here’s the thing: ESPN has every single important live sporting event locked up, except for the NHL. Simmons’s fans will still be tuning to ESPN, because they have no other choice, for the most part. Those eyeballs — male eyeballs, 18- to 49-year-old eyeballs that are so prized by television advertisers — will be watching ESPN whether Simmons is there or not. (And he won’t be there when ESPN’s “NBA Countdown” show returns for the season: Simmons was not a good fit on that crew, and will instead host a Grantland-branded basketball show of his own when he returns from his suspension.)

So that leaves the question of how much Simmons needs ESPN. Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch, who thinks Simmons will stay at ESPN, wrote Sunday night that the network’s massive presence in nearly every aspect of U.S. sporting life is too good an opportunity to walk away from.

But here is the simple truth: No other entity affords Simmons more resources and distribution for his work. No other entity has tangible connections to his beloved NBA and that will remain even more true when the NBA re-ups with ESPN next year. I also don’t believe Simmons can make more money elsewhere. Finally, Bill Simmons likes being famous, which is something ESPN does very well for its top talent. I predict he stays.

This is all true. Simmons told Rolling Stone’s Rob Tannenbaum, in outtakes from a story the magazine published early this year, that he would have to think about leaving ESPN if the network ever lost its NBA package, which seems unlikely to happen. But what if Simmons decides to follow the route taken by former ESPN star Dan Patrick, who left the network in 2007 to essentially become a free agent (he now has a syndicated radio show and hosts the “Football Night in America” studio show for NBC.

That’s the theory being forwarded by the Big Lead’s Jason McIntyre:

The old guard has its fingers crossed they can pester and annoy Simmons to the point that he pulls the trigger on a plan they claim he’s been mulling after spending so much time in Hollywood: decamp from ESPN to a venture capital-backed solo operation with contributions from his West Coast buddies Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla.

Simmons has shown multiple times in the past that he really, really hates being told what to do, about anything. In “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s 2011 oral history of the network, ESPN.com editor Jay Lovinger detailed the way Simmons prefers to be edited (as transcribed by Slate):

“You don’t really edit him,” Lovinger says. “He turns in his thing, you suggest stuff, he writes ‘Stet all changes,’ on the copy, you fight with him over things, he goes to [John] Walsh or [John] Skipper to complain, and you say to yourself, ‘I don’t need this grief.’ His goal is to get you to the point where it’s such a pain in the neck that you just put the stuff through—unless there’s something you’re going to get sued over.”

Simmons could be his own boss, his own editor. One would think that’s an enticing prospect, especially in light of recent events.