I've been a Stoolie since Dave was handing out papers outside South Station and I was taking the Red Line into work. I'm not going to deny that an element of the site is geared towards bros. That said, their reputation does not match up with the content on their site. Folks tend to paint broadly and believe that less than 5% of their content is representative of the site on a whole.
There are some good local sports writers. Thorton (while terrible on EEI) does a great weekly breakdown of Pats games, Greenberg does excellent work covering the C's and now the NBA, RA does good with for the B's and I like Carrabis on the Sox. Chaps is also a great contributor both as a humor blogger and with his military/current events podcast.
But among all the various personalities, the Pardon My Take boys are the best. They provide some solid written material, but the podcast is just a phenomenal blend of humor and sports (download, unsubscribe, resubscribe, rate five stars). It provides something that was missing from sports media until they came along (ht to SVP and Russilo who tried it years ago).
As a long-time fan, I have a strange vested interest in their success. They are my guys. While I am never going to be up at 1AM ET to watch a sports show, I was happy (dare I say even proud) that they were given this opportunity.
ESPN is well within their rights to cut the show to avoid controversy. They are a mainstream media company that wants to avoid controversy at all costs. However, they were desperate to appeal more to the M/18-35 demographic and it led to poor decision making. But this should have been figured before they signed the contract. This show should have never been green lit and ESPN looks terrible for it, particularly among that demo.
I feel for the PMT boys, but this won't be their last opportunity. They're too talented and hard working to fail. Plus, according to Twitter, the Mooch will be on soon to discuss jobs you had for less than two weeks and that will be gold.