DrewDawg said:
Actually, it's how most companies would handle something like that.
Not to mention there's a history here, both long term, with Simmons, and short term, with employees not respecting the parent company.
Simmons has baited his bosses at ESPN for years. He's made no secret of the fact that he believes he's better than them at pretty much everything from content generation to connecting to fans, and that they owe much of their success in the online game to him. In some respects, he's right. He's shaped a lot of the direction this generation of sports writing has gone. But in some sense, he's kind of like Goodell. Just because you're presiding over an area of excellent growth in your company doesn't mean it's all attributable to you. ESPN probably does just fine without Simmons, it just looks different. Difference of course being that Simmons is better at his job than Goodell, but there's almost negative appreciation for the fact that ESPN has a lot of masters and he sometimes needs to be a good employee. He Keith Hernandez's them constantly.
And in recent memory, ESPN has had a couple of notable bits of disrespect from its own employees ignoring their requests. Max Kellerman went on and talked personally about his own domestic violence history immediately after ESPN asked its hosts not to because they were trying to recover after the SAS comments. Dan LeBetard went to Deadspin to sell his HoF vote when ESPN would have killed to do a Sportsnation event for filling out a hall of fame ballot. Then, when they asked him to run his stunts by them first so they weren't blindsided, he bought the billboard in Cleveland to mock LeBron. I imagine John Walsh is pretty pissed off in general at personalities he thinks are too big for their britches right now.
Do I think 3 weeks is ludicrous? Yes. But do I see how it got to that point? Also, yes. This was their statement suspension. It'll be really interesting to see how Simmons responds.
