The meeting of the minds that was the Bill Simmons/Colin Cowherd podcast from yesterday is so befuddling that I literally could not sleep after hearing it; instead, I transcribed some of it, including a lengthy discussion on Cowherd’s infamous takedown of this site.

I listen to these things so you don’t have to, folks!

(I warn now that this is way more text than you’re used to. I promise it’s still less a little less agonizing than the podcast itself as a listening experience.)

The origin story of the infamous Day of Schrutebag begins near the ten-minute mark, on a tangent from Simmons saying that his wife would make a good sideline reporter because she’s perceptive (no, really):

Cowherd: “Years ago, print media had such a stranglehold on the critic business. Now blogs have taken it over. Your audience and my audience is much more blog-ish than newspaper-ish. My radio audience doesn’t subscribe to a newspaper. Nothing personal, but if Phil Mushnick rips me, I’ll get one email; if The Big Lead rips me, I get 400. What does that tell you? It tells you the highway that goes into my show is more blog than newspaper.”

Simmons: “But it’s still a relatively small part of your demographic.”

Cowherd: “Absolutely. Criticism’s healthy. I like to read — as long as it’s somebody respectful, uh, you know, that has common sense, I don’t mind. I think it’s kind of healthy to read it.”

Simmons: “You got into hot water two years ago. You sent a bunch of listeners to The Big Lead and it crashed the website, it actually turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to that guy’s site. And the blogosphere went after you. Now, it seems like, you haven’t done anything like that in a couple years. Are you in a better place with all the bloggers?”

Cowherd: “I regretted doing it. It was the first day we were on ESPN.com.” Cowherd explains that he gets an email from a producer saying ESPN.com is getting tons of hits. “Well, this is a lot of power, let’s just blow somebody up. And then I’m an idiot, and I said (to the producer), ‘What’s that media website you go to?’ “At the time, I’d never heard of it. From that point on I did. But I regret doing that.”

Simmons: “The thing that interested me about it is, you’ve gotten in hot water a couple times, you’ve apologized for it. I’m of the opinion…I can see why the blogs would be upset and all that stuff, but at the same time, if the roles had been reversed and they had shut down your ESPN Radio site, they would’ve been excited about it. ‘Oh, look what we did.’” But I guess you have a bigger pulpit, so you have more responsibility and they’re kinda the underdog. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way, though, because I remember when they tested out the ESPN Conversation at the end of 2007 (Note: It was February.) underneath the column, and they hadn’t told me it was going to happen. And one of the sites sent a whole bunch of people (note the pageviews on the link) and they posted all this stuff about me and my wife, and all this stuff underneath. And then they were like celebrating afterward. So then when your thing happened with The Big Lead, it was kind of the opposite of that, but then all of a sudden you’re a bad guy. So that’s the part I never got.”

Cowherd: “Well, I think it is, listen, ESPN’s a big target. For better or worse, it’s the sports company of note in this country. And when you work at ESPN, it’s like I have friends in Portland at Nike, and the wind blows harder at the top of the mountain, and ESPN’s a big target, and so the little guys, the blog (sic), are going to see ESPN naturally as a little bit of an enemy and a bully. So that’s just the way it is. It’s like news with the Lakers is a big deal; news with the Clippers is less of a big deal. Because they’re the Lakers and because they’re the Clippers. You know, ESPN’s a big target and I’m a target because I work here.”

Simmons: “Yeah, but why does anybody have to be a bully? It seems like we’re all in this together. We all like sports. Some people have a bigger forum than others. I don’t begrudge any blogger, whoever, from having an audience. Do what you have to do. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor about stuff. Even what happened when they did the Conversation thing, I joked about it in a post on Deadspin, you know, eighteen months later. Stuff happens. The part that I didn’t like was that, ‘You were such a bully and a bad guy ’cause you crashed this guy’s website,’ and meanwhile, it was the best thing that ever happened to that website.”

Cowherd: “Well, and by the way, I just had a blog, within the last several months, post my home phone number. I mean, so, that doesn’t get mentioned by the bloggers. They posted my home phone number. And thank God I was two feet from Verizon, so I went and changed it, but, I’m at the point where, I think, Bill, like you, I remember reading you years ago–”

Simmons: “It was probably my old website. Boston Sports Guy.”

Cowherd: “Yeah, Boston Sports Guy! This was ten years ago. And you wrote something about Trot Nixon that made me laugh. You said he looked like, something about Trot Nixon or he was stiffer than Al Gore. I remember laughing with my guys in the sports office in Portland. And, you know, the reality was, you’ve grown in stature. And I think, when you grow in stature–again, better or worse, I’ve grown in stature over the last ten years of my career–you’re gonna get hit. And some of it’s gonna be really unfair, and some of it’s gonna be unsightly and unseemly. But it’s just part of it. I don’t read a lot of it. You know you’re good. I mean, you have done, it’s pretty amazing.”

Simmons (muffles laugh): “Stop.”

Cowherd: “I mean, seriously, you’re one of the only people in the world outside of the big companies that makes money on the Internet. It’s pretty amazing. For your audience, it’s a pretty amazing thing. I have a website; believe me, I’m just trying to get flies in there. So, I think as you grow in stature–I would rather be known and people take cheap shots or shots at me than be unknown, you know, I’d rather get the shots if the payoff is, you’re popular.”

Simmons: “There is definitely a trade-off. I had a tough time, 2005-2006, in that range, kind of slowly realizing that I wasn’t the underdog anymore. It was kind of depressing. I had made my bones on this website that, for two years, I didn’t have more than 2,000 readers, and even by the fourth year I only had 15,000. And it was weird for me to think that things had shifted like that. All of a sudden, you’re not the underdog anymore, you’re the guy that people are taking shots at because, for whatever reason, I don’t know, it was depressing. It was like, ‘Is this what it’s like?’ This is what you fight to get to, the point where everybody takes shots at you? I’m in a much better place with it now. I just think it bounces off you, you can’t take it seriously. To these people, you’re not a dude who has a wife and kids and who worked hard to get wherever you are, you’re basically a commodity.”

They continue on, talking about styles of journalism (Simmons: “I think I’m a writer. The term journalist depends on what you want to make out of it. I think I’m a columnist and a writer, who has a podcast.”; Cowherd: “I never thought of myself as a little guy. To me, bombastic won, funny won, outrageous won. I never wanted to be the little guy”; Simmons: “The thing I think everybody has to remember is that we’re all in this together. We’re all looking to follow sports and have a good time”), but let’s all exhale and examine this.

Simmons and Cowherd both seem to understand that with prominence and exposure comes more scrutiny, and understand that there’s little they can do about it but breathe, even if things like crude comments about family and the posting of a home phone number cross a line.

Cowherd regrets crashing this website, but Simmons, proprietor of his own little website back in the day, does not seem to understand the frustration and powerlessness that come from being besieged with attention and unable to do anything. Perhaps that’s because his site was on America Online (before it became this blog), which is a little more reliable and sturdy, or because he was, as he points out, not getting nearly the kind of traffic Cowherd sent here.

But Simmons, who “made his bones” as a Web guy, seems not to realize that some bloggers, like the guy who runs this site and was featured in Simmons’ (former) magazine for doing so, are trying to carve out a living with a website. The way to do that is, of course, by putting together compelling content, hosting it on a server, and trying to get advertising.

There is no good way to prepare for an avalanche of traffic except by having a great server. And those cost a lot more money than the average blogger has.

ESPN’s power and reach are well and good as Simmons and Cowherd see them, but, from this have-not with a downed site, it seems like the best things about that reach are the peace of mind that comes with having a stable platform that can support you doing your job and the insulation from the vicissitudes of Internet writing as the yeoman does it that peace of mind entails.

Simmons is right in that “we’re all in this together,” and can share outrage and joy and so on and so forth from sports. But he, as a writer who came of age and rose to dizzying popularity on the Internet after struggling mightily at first, should know that there most bloggers are scraping together livings, and not raking in huge salaries.

He says, later, “You pretend you’re not mainstream, but you are mainstream to a degree. There are mainstream blogs. Everyone knows who the mainstream ones are. And if they write something that is relevant, people are going to see it. It’s not like 1997, where if you wrote something, nobody would ever see it. You could have a blog for one day and it could be emailed around in the right hands, and all of a sudden you might have 20,000 readers. I think the whole underdog thing, they gotta kinda reconcile that a little. We’re all fine with them, we all want them to do well, so now let’s go to the next level.”

Cowherd, to his eternal credit, actually defends The Big Lead: “The Big Lead, to me, in the last six months to eight months to a year, has gotten a little more adult. I think they’re understanding there’s a gravitas to what they do. I think I go to them probably every day.”

But he also throws this in: “Some of them do really funny work.”

Simmons’ sense of what “mainstream” means, and his conflation of “readers” with pageviews, is astonishingly wrong, and indicative of his detachment from the realities of blogging for pay. Cowherd’s continual use of “funny” as the modifier of choice for blogs is marginalizing at its best and worst.

To bloggers whose worth to their employers and their bank accounts is determined by pageviews and ad revenue, saying “We’re all in this together” seems like just another way to bat down criticism. To bloggers who write great, gripping stories, delve into statistics, or generally practice journalism in their own way, “funny” is an epithet.

It’s more disappointing than anything: These are the people many, many sports fanstrust to inform them on sports, and, because the demographics of sports fans also lend themselves to adherence to an ideology, these are the viewpoints readers adopt as their own. Doing that, for a fan, creates a cycle of ignorance and laziness (it’s not hard, at all, to find the best blogs on the Internet) that just powers a “louder is better,” authority-centric view that gives ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports, an undeserved monopoly on opinion.

But if the fat cats like Simmons and Cowherd, well-paid and well-disseminated, continue to misunderstand blogging and bloggers, and rest on their laurels and stature, I can promise that the underdogs in the blog world will bite.

After all, underdogs are hungry.

Other topics covered in less detail: The details of Colin Cowherd’s rise to fame (started as a TV guy in Las Vegas, got discovered as a radio guy while filling in on a Tampa station, went to Portland, and landed in Bristol at ESPN); the phrase “Ron Artesty,” which caused my eardrums to try to rupture themselves; sports as in-person experience versus TV experience (neither goes to many games); Cowherd says “We’re living in a brown world,” referring to diversity; they both bash beat writers, Cowherd saying “You’re not going to get young kids with beat reporters; Cowherd says “Breaking stories is overrated”;Â Sportsnation, the show, is discussed, though Cowherd’s co-host, Michelle Beadle, is called “fetching” by Simmons and never gets the dignity of a name, though Cowherd says “get-it girl” several times and compares her to Joy Behar; soccer’s growth (neither gets why the MLS isn’t a big league, both seem surprised that the most popular sport on Earth’s high-quality games on a basic cable channel beat hockey on an obscure cable channel, and they dance comically around the idea that the best European leagues are actually successful; Simmons also says he’s going to start following Tottenham Hotspur like he said he would three years ago); dieting (Cowherd’s ex-wife is a triathlete); Simmons repeatedly says “Wimbleton” rather than “Wimbledon” and both say “He-DOO” like Sea-Doo rather than “He-dough” Turkoglu.