Last week, it sounded to us like maybe a Dan LeBatard-Bill Simmons podcast about Jason Whitlock and ESPN had been edited to shorten the discussion of Whitlock … and now it’s been confirmed. In a pretty wide-ranging interview Simmons did on LeBatard’s radio show in Miami last week, the two candidly discussed ESPN at length, and LeBatard revealed that he was suspended from PTI when he opined that the Bobby Knight movie was a “mountain of elephant crap.”

The good stuff begins about 2/3 of the way through:

LeBatard: “ESPN does a million things well, but we talked about something at the beginning [of the podcast] for the first 10 mins … [about] ESPN not being very good with being criticized, and how unbecoming I find that … they cut out 10 minutes of the conversation!”
(Laughter from Simmons)
LeBatard: “They cut out 10 minutes of our talk about Joe Buck, and they only left in the part where we talked about 30/30 [ESPN summer fare]. That’s unbelievable that they did that!”
Simmons: [Jokingly stammering] “Ahhhh, errr, yeah. Well … I guess their thinking was that it was an hour long podcast …”
LeBatard: “Why are you doing the tapdance? Why are you doing the stammering tapdance? You’ve got problems with authority, you’re a rebel … you’re an anarchist …”
Simmons: [phone making noise]
LeBatard: “What, are you pretending your phone is creeping out?”
Simmons: “I think they’re tampering with it!”
LeBatard: “He doesn’t like this conversation and I understand why he doesn’t like it … but come on, Bill, it’s your podcast … we weren’t ripping ESPN, we were talking honestly about media criticism… ESPN should be covered like a sports team, it’s that kind of brand.”
Simmons: “I guess the thinking was that I covered a lot of the this on podcasts before … I didn’t totally have a problem with it because i had already had a lot of that conversation previously … it’s a big company, it’s going to do a lot of good things and a lot of bad things.”
[LeBatard's partner in crime]: “… come on, rip ‘em!”
Lebatard: “He won’t do it.”
[Later in the conversation]
Simmons: “Would you have talked about that PTI?”
LeBatard: “I got suspended from PTI for calling the Bobby Knight movie a mountain of elephant crap.”
Simmons: “REALLY?”
Lebatard closed with: “I love the company. I just dont think anyone is perfect. And I think there’s an inherent hypocrisy with ESPN being totally OK criticizing everyone else, but [essentially saying] don’t do it to us from inside the building.”

If LeBatard gets suspended for any of this – unlikely, but you never know – can we put in a request for some fresh PTI (read: anyone) meat besides the usual backup tandem of Bob Ryan and JA Adande?