Sad (or Happy?) Bill Simmons-Related Thought For the Day

It's Wednesday. As in the day that's three full days after Sunday. And yet, Bill's NFL picks from last week are still on the front page of ESPN.com. They're the featured Page 2 link. The last of the week's games finished almost 36 fucking hours ago. Since then, ESPN's other writers have put out plenty of material. But when the site's editors make their decisions as to what will generate the most traffic, they choose to keep a column in the spotlight that at this point is relevant for no other purpose besides noting how awful Bill is at making gambling picks. (5-9-1 against the spread last week, now 11-19-1 for the season.) So my point, of course, is that this is pretty tragic. Or at least appears to be on the surface. Is this guy really this popular? Really? The average ESPN.com visitor wouldn't rather read something else? Even TMQ's brand new article (which I will attempt to parse tonight, as long as it doesn't give me an aneurysm) takes a back seat to Bill's rotting leftovers.

Now, the reason I say it appears to be pretty tragic on the surface is that there's a chance Bill is slowly approaching the Mariotti zone. You know what I mean- where a columnist generates a ton of traffic, but the majority of it comes from people who hope he gets crushed in a revolving door accident. When Mariotti left the Sun-Times, commenter Larry (no relation to me, but great name anyways) posted a link to a poll on their website in which the split of people said they'd miss Jaybird vs. those who said they wouldn't was something like 23% to 77%. I'm sure Bill's disapproval rating isn't that high yet... but I'm holding out hope that he's on his way there. Hoping and hoping and hoping. That's the same way I tried to solve the problem of being a fuckbag of a loser in high school, and look where I am today!