With SI's Peter King launching his new website, The MMQB, "there are obviously going to be Grantland comparisons," and if it "can get anywhere close to that site’s standard ... then sports fans should rejoice," according to Raju Mudhar of the TORONTO STAR. While Grantland "deftly covers both sports and pop culture," King's site "will be more strictly football focused." Many King fans "don’t like it when he strays from football, although the counter argument is that the personal stuff he’s written, the travel notes, the beer and coffee nerdery, were among the things that actually helped build his brand." King said, "I am still going to write about what pisses me off on the road ... I will probably have three or four sentences in an 8,000 word column on some beer I had that week that I thought was good." Mudhar wrote what will be "interesting is whether this is going to be the new order of things, and whether other sites will follow by putting their marquee presences out front in such a big manner." Grantland's Bill Simmons and King are two writers who had "almost outgrown their respective entities." Mudhar: "The question it makes me wonder about is if someone in Canada could do the same kind of thing based around hockey." Of the "big personalities, there doesn’t seem an exact right fit, at least for this type of specialized website imprint." The CBC's Don Cherry and Ron MacLean "definitely have the visibility, but don’t write." TSN’s Bob McKenzie "definitely has the Twitter audience, and while he did start as a writer, he is now clearly TV first." Sportsnet's Bob McCown "has the radio locked down, but from what I’ve read in Sportsnet magazine, I don’t really need to read more" (TORONTO STAR, 7/23).
INSIDE SCOOP: King appeared on ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike" yesterday and said one of the first things posted on The MMQB was Cowboys coach Jason Garrett's full 35-minute pre-training camp speech. King said, "I wanted to kick it off with something that people have never seen before and I wanted to take people inside the inner sanctum of a team. We did that. Those the kinds of things we're going to try to do most of all" ("Mike & Mike," ESPN Radio, 7/23).
RULER OF YOUR DOMAIN: USA TODAY's Chris Strauss notes the URL MMQB.com, which "focuses on 'The Business of the Contract Furnishing Industry,'" on Monday featured a screen grab from King's site "with 'Really dude?' written over it." MMQB.com Editor Michael Wolf wrote in an e-mail regarding The MMQB, "Through a third party they wanted to pay $1,500 for the domain name about two months ago. I countered at $1 million. That was it" (USA TODAY, 7/23).
