Bill Simmons Accuses ESPN Of Being An NFL Mouthpiece

"It’s hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL, because they were."
Bill Simmons reacts to a play during the Sprint NBA All-Star Celebrity Game 2014 at Sprint Arena during the 2014 NBA All-Star Jam Session in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Bill Simmons reacts to a play during the Sprint NBA All-Star Celebrity Game 2014 at Sprint Arena during the 2014 NBA All-Star Jam Session in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Joe Murphy via Getty Images

To hear Bill Simmons tell it, what we really learned from Deflategate had nothing to do with Tom Brady's balls and everything to do with ESPN shilling for the NFL.

Simmons -- who used to work for ESPN as editor-in-chief of Grantland before he was controversially fired -- used his second podcast to accuse the sports network of being "in the bag" for the NFL based on the league's handling of Deflategate.

"The way everyone else was covering Roger Goodell in this whole story versus the way ESPN covered it, it was embarrassing," Simmons said. "I couldn’t believe nobody called out ESPN about it."

At which point Simmons proceeded to call them out about it:

“You have Dan Wetzel at Yahoo, you had Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post, you had all the people in Boston, you had different radio personalities, and people really going after how the NFL was handling this, how Goodell was handling this, all this stuff. Especially in the weeks after the broken cell phone thing, when it came out that they had obviously leaked stuff and something really legitimately shady was going on, and yet if you went to ESPN you didn’t see anything…

He concluded, "It’s hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL, because they were."

Listen to the podcast in full below:

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