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Visions Of Grantland: Bill Simmons’ Lost Opportunity To Do Something New

I feel like I came into my own as a high schooler and college sportswriter during the hey day of ESPN’s Page 2. I still stalk anything Paul Lukas writes thanks to the uber-specific UniWatch pieces. Every time I tell Dan Shanoff how much the original Daily Quickie influenced my own writing style, I get worried that he’ll block my e-mail address.

The writing was clever, thought out. Simmons was a natural fit there, because the audience could tolerate the use of the first person pronoun and a personal story here and there. Writers have back stories, after all. This was about them, their stories, in a clever insight into the life of sports as we all watch it.

Sure, the colors were the bold red and yellow of ESPN, but, in most cases, the content – the words on the page – would have fit nicely on the white background, Georgian-texted Grantland:

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