Bill Simmons blasted his former employer ESPN on Thursday over the sports media behemoth’s “embarrassing” Deflategate coverage.
Simmons, whose contract wasn’t renewed by ESPN in May, said the home of “Monday Night Football” was pretty friendly to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell during the deflated football controversy swirling around the New England Patriots and quarterback Tom Brady.
“Granted, I’m a little biased here,” he said on his new podcast released on Thursday. “The way everyone else was covering Goodell’s role in this whole story versus the way ESPN covered it, it was embarrassing. I couldn’t believe nobody called out ESPN about it.”
Simmons went on to point out the journalists who covered the NFL’s handling of the deflated footballs controversy critically compared to ESPN’s kid-glove treatment.
“It’s hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL, because they were,” he added.
Simmons was suspended by ESPN in September of 2014 after calling commissioner Goodell a liar in regards to his handling of the Ray Rice domestic abuse case.
This was the beginning of the end for Simmons at ESPN; he landed quite well, moving over to Fox Sports and HBO, where he’ll have his own show in 2016.