Discussion: Bill Simmons Is Out At ESPN

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Discussion for article #236146

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And Grantland and Simmons are also fairly tight with Silver and 538…wonder if there will be any domino effect there.

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The Sports Guy used to be a terrific read. Then he got a little too impressed with himself, and now he’s pretty much of a bore, though he does still make me laugh on occasion. There’s been a switch in perspective that now infects his writing, from clever & knowledgeable outsider to pretentious insider, and it saddens me to think his earlier persona was just fashion and not truly him.

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The Onion, as usual, nailed it:

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“What I really love about my writing—and believe me there’s a lot I love about it—is that my love for my writing comes across in what I’ve written,” Simmons said while signing books for party attendees, some of whom had reportedly requested the honor. “I have in any case been told it does, sometimes at its oddest moments, and that, for me, is a source of great pride. But I confess what I’m most proud of are the comparisons to the greats: Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, David Halberstam, John McPhee, Aaron Spelling. I’m really glad I was able to make those.”

–The Onion

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My problem with him began when I listened to one of his podcasts. I, fortunately, had never heard his voice before and once I did I could never get it out of my head when I read his stuff. I’ve never fully enjoyed it since.

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Have you seen the backlash from Nate’s predictions in the UK election? Nate blew that one big time.

Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday’s UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour’s 233.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/nate-silver-polls-are-failing-us-206799.html

Of course, according to Nate, it wasn’t his fault. All the polls were wrong

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The one and only time I ever enjoyed reading Simmons was way back before Grantland, when Charlie Pierce was still (mostly) sports blogging on the Boston Globe site, and when they got into what looked superficially like a no-rules blog insult battle* (IMO Pierce won it easily due to his shocking resort to cheap stunts, like underlying truth, a clear advantage in actual writing talent, & the fact that no one does insults like Pierce.), which, when it emerged that Pierce would be writing long pieces for Grantland, was in reality Good Clean Fun.*

*even tho it was obvious Pierce was pulling his punches a la Ali “versus” Cosell; in his sports blogging at least, Pierce’s vintage shots have been at Mitch Albom.

**albeit, the rounds went overwhelmingly to Pierce & fans of his sports writing.

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Is this really a shock of any kind at all now that ESPN has moved into serious competition with the trad networks to buy full-range sportsball broadcast rights? I mean, how do ESPN executives wishing to negotiate with the NFL explain Simmons’ rants against the completely corporatist slime mould Goodell when every entity and individual directly involved with the negotiations are themselves media megacorps or the corporatist slime moulds that run them?

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I haven’t been following Nate Silver since his move to ESPN, but he is right, all of the polls for the UK election weren’t just wrong, they were badly, badly, badly wrong. (They’re thinking maybe there is a sort of “Bradley Effect” in the UK, except it’s that people are reluctant to admit that they are voting Conservative.)

And here’s the other thing: even things that have only one chance in a million of occurring do, on that one occasion, occur. So if Nate weren’t wrong, say, 40% of the time when he said something had a 60% chance of occurring, it would mean he wasn’t reading the statistics correctly.

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But his English Premier League predictions are still valid, right? And his statistical analysis proving that intentionally fouling a poor free throw shooter is counterproductive still holds water?

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This isn’t the first time he blew it on UK elections. He did poorly in 2010 as well.

It is also worth pointing out that Silver built a forecasting model for the 2010 UK election, which did turn out to be structurally unusual because of the strong Lib Dem/Nick Clegg performance. Silver got into squabbles with British analysts whose models were too simple for his liking, and the whole affair was an exemplar of what Silver’s biggest fans imagine his role to be: the empiricist hard man, crashing in on the pseophological old boys’ club and delivering two-fisted blasts of rugged science. It did not go well in the end…

Source: http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/tarnished-silver-assessing-the-new-king-of-stats/

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Nate’s problem might be that he is accustomed to a 2 party race. The variables possible when there are several parties probably never entered into his predictions. The results in the UK show that UKIP actually took more votes away from Labour than Conservative candidates - something that no-one thought possible (except Cameron).

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Oh dog, I missed some BS about sports? People run, kick, punt, bla bla bla and I should give the slightest little fk? Oh, my daughter ran, tripped and fell, please let the world respond to her future!

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I certainly agree with your first paragraph. It wasn’t as if ‘just’ 538 got the UK wrong - EVERYONE did. And regardless of differences in how they interpreted the polling, every media and pundit prediction relied on it.

While I admit to some sympathy to what’s in your second paragraph, it’s not as if the UK is some small state or country. Around 40 millions voted in yesterday’s UK elections. Plus, the 3:2 split you refer to (I’m supposing for illustration purposes) can’t apply to either

  • those elections (since ALL credible expert poll analysts were wrong in the same direction, albeit not all to the same extent), or
  • 538, because it only rarely or parenthetically indulges in ‘predictions’ per se; overwhelmingly, 538 concludes, if it does at all, in probabilities, typically in terms of percentage likelihood, for two or more, usually more, potential outcomes
    (I’m not a 538 fan or regular reader, nor am I a Silverite - I prefer Sam Wang’s Princeton project when it’s involved. I do, however, place Silver and his website high up among the more rational poll aggregation analysts and and not much if at all (and then mostly unintentionally) among those using their service to advance particular partisan causes or pols.)

Finally, I think we’re going to have to show a little patience just to find out in some greater detail what the UK results actually are before anyone’s credibly able to draw big lessons. I’ve been concerned for a long time about Labour going into this election, due to the inadequacies of its top leadership, not just Milibrand (a sop so milky he makes Cameron seem fizzy.), but due to its cra-cra-insane abandonment of Keynes and embrace of austerity for

  • being wrong,
  • forcing Scotland’s Labour vote to the SNP,
  • Being Wrong,
  • failing to allow for a sharp distinction with the policies of Cameron and the ludicrous inanities he allows to Osborne,
  • BEING WRONG,
  • abandoning courage for frickin’ POLLSTERS advice, and
  • BEING WRONG!

But as bad as it is to be WRONG!, weak, cowardly, indistinguishable, and strategically suicidal, I’m still thinking Silver may well be proven right in general terms, to wit that there were some dimensions in play here that the pollsters just didn’t pursue in a way that would make some forces and trends apparent to analysts. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking Brit xenojingoism (like jingoism everywhere, but xeno in much the way of the American version) combined with something we here just aren’t faced with confronting at all let alone constantly: the sense that they’re wasting their (THEIR) victories over Germany in last century’s “World Wars”.

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That’s an interesting point.

Saw a cool graphic somewhere about a UK version of the Bradley effect. Basically, plenty of cases of “shy Tories” over the past 20+ years, folks who vote Conservative but claim they’re voting for anothe

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I’m not even going to pretend I care about Mr. Simmons.

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Fired for telling the Truth? Who would have guessed it, in this day and age. The National Fartball League must have more “power” than we thought.

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I’m not much of a sports fan, but Grantland is my favorite site for television and movie analysis.

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