Weighing in on Grantland seems like the flavor of the day and boy could I go for some ice cream…

1. You can’t launch with an awful design AND not have an RSS feed. You can get away with one or the other, but not both. And honestly, this wouldn’t be a huge deal if this was some small budget start-up with little funding. Instead, ESPN appears to have given an unlimited editorial budget to Simmons that he has used unsparingly to scoop up a ton of talented writers, but if there’s that much cheddar floating around in Daddy’s drawer some of it should have gone in to designing a site that doesn’t look like McSweeney’s dry humped Craigslist. (In a wonderfully ironic turn of events, the poor squatter with the @grantland handle on Twitter, who also happens to be a web designer, offered a few Grantland thoughts for all of the people mistaking him for the official @grantland33 feed). 

2.  In Bill’s introduction column, he wrote this:

“The second (goal) was to find sponsors we liked and integrate them within the site — so readers didn’t have to pay for content, and also, so we didn’t have to gravitate toward quantity over quality just to chase page views.” 

Just minutes later I was needlessly clicking to a second page on Klosterman’s article. Mixed messages aside, why would a site with a treasure trove of original, in-demand content not provide it as cleanly as possible across as many platforms as possible?

3. As far as the actual writing goes, I’m sure it will be fine. There have been a few promising pieces and a few “meh” pieces out of the blocks. Like many people have already observed, there are far too many talented writers involved for it to ultimately fall flat on it’s face. I’m of the belief that there can never be too much stuff or noise on the internet to sift through. The good stuff will always rise to the top. (The problem, in fact, is that there is *too much* good stuff and not enough time to get to it.) Grantland has plenty of time to evolve into something special and I’ll be along for the ride, even if a lack of a RSS feed makes me begrudginly visit the brick and mortar version. At this point, it’s mainly just readjusting expectations and taking the good (Jonathan Abrams on Donnie Walsh) with the bad (Simmons on Coldplay). They won’t all be must-reads, but there will be enough to keep most heady sports fans coming back.

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I actually had a few other thoughts, but then @josephvolk and I had a phone conversation mid-post and he proceeded to describe every plot point from Game of Thrones and totally derailed all of my momentum!

I will say this: if you read one thing about Grantland, please let it be Tommy Craggs absolutely annihilating the site’s namesake. He writes sentences that make my head spin.

And lastly and definitely most importantly, WHO KILLED ROSIE LARSEN?!