FanHouse Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons is becoming like Brett Favre in the sense that ESPN is shoving him down our throats.

(Except in Simmons' case, it's for his new book, not for his annual coming-out-of-retirement announcement. Unlike Simmons, however, Favre doesn't block random bloggers from following his Twitter account. Moving on...)

And last night he landed on the Colbert Report to talk about his new 700-page basketball book with the world's favorite "fundit."

What resulted was a pretty fantastic interview, particularly when you consider that Simmons managed to stop Colbert in his Air-Bud-mentioning tracks with an "I've got two pages comparing Teen Wolf to Kobe Bryant" line. You could even tell that Colbert was asking if that was real as they cut away, and he somehow managed to let the interview run long, which almost never happens.

In case you've had your head under a rock the last couple weeks, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons has a new book out. The Book of Basketball is some 700 pages, which makes it quite a large (and expensive) read.

Since this is kind of a big deal for Simmons, he's been all over the place promoting the book. Besides his tour and an bit with Kenny Mayne that Mike Francesa didn't like, Simmons also stopped by ESPN2's SportsNation Wednesday afternoon. It was there that his book was put through a rather, um, unique test.

WASHINGTON -- No one covers book signings. There is probably a reason for this. But with the second Bill Simmons book tour commencing in Washington on Monday, it seemed like a good enough idea. At the least, 15-year-old, Page 2-gobbling me would be quite delighted.

I called a friend of mine to inform him of my ever-bloggable plan. "You mean like Deadspin did for his first tour?" came the reply. Pause. Google search. Well, then.

Despite this inauspicious start, I buckled up and headed out with another buddy. The Sports Guy was waiting.

ESPN.com's Bill Simmons is currently on his book tour (more on that here), but on Monday, he and his Beverly Hills mansion were featured on "Mayne Street."

Kenny Mayne has made a career out of his deadpanned quirkiness. That, along with the fact that Simmons doesn't have much of an acting resume, figured to make for an uncomfortable four or five minutes that included me wincing as Simmons stumbled through his lines while Mayne got all the laughs.

Didn't happen. In fact, Simmons stole the episode. Jenn with two n's, the Doug Christie Clippers jersey, Stacy Keibler calling Mayne "Lenny", business associate Scott -- all hilarious. Well, to everybody but Mike Francesa, who was railing about Simmons' performance on his radio show.

(UPDATE: "Mayne Street" segment, Francesa's comments,and Simmons' response all after the jump.)

During my visit to Bristol, Connecticut, last week, I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of ESPN employees about Twitter. I was assured that ESPN does not hate Twitter, but more than that, several ESPN employees told me they're actively studying the use of Twitter by ESPN talent.

And, when it comes to ESPN talent on Twitter, I was told by one ESPN staffer, "Bill Simmons is number one, and number two is -- there is no number two."

The weekend Brandon Jennings saga will only gain steam this week as talking heads give us the holy word on how a 19-year-old professional athlete should act. (Because 40-year-old white men know best, right?) In case you missed it, in a phone conversation with rapper Joe Budden, Jennings disparaged the Knicks, Chris Duhon, Ricky Rubio and (depending how you look at it) Luke Ridnour. Budden streamed the conversation on his Web site (apparently unbeknownst to Jennings). In the aftermath, Jennings erased his entire Twitter account and Budden sought to remove an unauthorized recording of his stream that had popped up on YouTube. (The video has popped back up, by the way.)

Responses from the blogosphere have been nuanced -- the FreeDarko sermon is particularly on target (and interesting, considering FD's Shoals helped break the story for The Baseline). But we have been through enough of these episodes before to know that the prevailing sanity will not last. Before the storm, allow me a question. (I think I've killed whatever suspense that line could illicit by posing the question in this post's headline.)

I really can't think of anything more demoralizing than losing to Jimmy Fallon. At anything. (I suppose I should mention this is a spoiler alert for the handful of diehards who faithfully patronize "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.") But that's what happened to the world's best golfer this morning.

After accepting Fallon's challenge earlier in the week, Tiger Woods made his way to Manhattan and proceeded to get whupped in his own game, Wii-style. Yep, that's right, Fallon, a self-proclaimed video game nut (That's mildly tolerable when you're in your early 20s; it's sad when you're in your mid 30s -- how is that not obvious?) "shot" par while Woods went double-bogey, bogey, quitting before the three-hole round was complete.

"I just got absolutely schooled in my own game," Woods said after the showdown at Times Square. "I certainly want a rematch."

Translation: "Next time I see Fallon, I'll have Stevie break his legs." (Moving pictures after the jump.)

Disclaimer: I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell a great deal. I read his books, columns and blog. There's a substantial backlash against him, especially in the sports world, but I'm not a part of it. He has great gifts in distillation and (in my opinion) telling stories. I'm a fan. (I also generally like Bill Simmons, for the record.)

But Gladwell's argument that the reverse-quality structure of the NBA draft "does untold damage" to the league is awful. I touched on Gladwell's discussion of "moral hazard" in the NBA draft over the weekend as it relates to another plea by the author (that teams think outside the box more frequently). But here I'd like to really dig into Gladwell's specific theory (endorsed by Simmons) that all teams would benefit from a complete reformation of the current draft system.

One of the maddening things about the Detroit Lions over the eight-year Matt Millen era -- and especially during their winless season in 2008 -- was that no matter how awful the team was, the coaches and front office seemed to feel certain that they were doing things the right way, and that they didn't need to change.

Every time Millen addressed the media during his horrendous run as the team's president, reporters would pose him questions about ways that the Lions should change their approach, and Millen would, without fail, insist that he had the right plan for changing the team's fortunes, and that they were close to turning the corner. And after Millen was finally fired early in the 2008 season, head coach Rod Marinelli constantly insisted that his approach to coaching was the right one, even as he became the first coach ever to finish a season 0-16.

In his lengthy dispatch exchange with ESPN's Bill Simmons, New Yorker writer and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell endorses wholesale changes to the NBA draft. Specifically, he wants to erase the incentive for bad teams -- he wants all teams, elite and awful, to have a shot at the best players in the draft.

Gladwell has most recently been the talk of basketball blogs for another opinion, that NBA and college teams need to embrace the full-court press as a legitimate strategy. Frankly, these two opinions don't make sense coming from the same person.