Eleven years after leaving ESPN, Bill Simmons is still finding new reasons to be angry at them. This week’s reason is a YouTube channel that no longer exists.
Answering a listener question on his podcast about “House Eats,” an old Grantland eating show hosted by his longtime friend Joe House, Simmons said ESPN “liquidated our Grantland YouTube channel.”
What He Said
“They liquidated our Grantland YouTube channel. I still can’t believe they did it,” Simmons said. “There’s four years of videos that we did that were, a lot of them were ahead of their time.”
On the decision itself: “They were just like, we’ll just liquidate all of it.”
He prefaced the whole thing by calling ESPN leadership vindictive, worked in two censored expletives, and signed off with a crude dismissal that is a running joke on his show. House hands out a weekly award on the podcast to whoever messed up worst that week, and the phrasing of that award is the phrasing Simmons used.
So the vulgarity is real, and it is also a bit. Both things.
The History Behind It
Grantland launched June 8, 2011, founded by Simmons and owned and operated by ESPN. It was a long-form sports and culture site that produced some of the best writing in the industry and a generation of writers who went on to run other publications.
Simmons left ESPN in May 2015. The network declined to renew a contract that dated to 2001, after years of friction that included a 2014 suspension and a public feud with then-president John Skipper.
ESPN announced Grantland’s shutdown on October 30, 2015, five months later, after an attempt to keep it running under Chris Connelly.
Per Simmons, the YouTube channel came down shortly after he left, taking roughly four years of video with it. The Grantland text archive is still online. Pages that embedded YouTube clips now show them as unavailable, which is the digital equivalent of a photo album with the pictures cut out.
Why This Is Worth Caring About
Media companies delete things constantly and nobody notices until someone goes looking. What makes the Grantland case different is that the written archive survived and the video did not, which suggests the deletion was a choice rather than a server migration.
Simmons has a clear interest in framing it as spite. He is also probably right that nothing was gained by removing it. A dormant YouTube channel costs nothing to host and generates small amounts of revenue indefinitely.
The broader point is that a lot of 2010s internet video is simply gone. Platforms shut down, companies restructure, and work that was never archived anywhere else disappears. Grantland’s video output was unusual for its era, and now the only evidence of most of it is people remembering it.
Where Simmons Sits Now
He founded The Ringer in 2016 and sold it to Spotify in 2020 for a reported $200 million. He holds a senior Spotify podcast and sports content role, re-upped his deal in 2025, and still hosts The Bill Simmons Podcast, which remains one of the most listened-to shows in sports.
In other words, he won. He built a company, sold it for nine figures and has a bigger audience than he did at ESPN.
He is also a man who will stop a podcast segment about an eating show to tell you what a network did to a video archive in 2015. That is the whole appeal.
ESPN has not responded.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.