I had to get this column out of me before I graduated. There is one sportswriter whose popularity in America today is unparalleled and who is more widely read than any other: Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, who writes for ESPN.com. I have my own opinions on him, which have been kept silent for quite some time, but that time is over.

You know that guy who thinks that all his friends are hilarious and that the stories that make him and Ray-Ray and P-Dog pee their pants will translate into humor for the masses? That guy who comes back from Vegas on Monday and tells you how wild his weekend was, only to get into how he had six shots of Absolut Citron, lost $400 and had a “ridiculous” drunken conversation with the dealer? That guy who treats the occasional night away from his petty, boring wife as an opportunity to cut loose at Hooters with the boys for a real rip-roaring good time?

That is Bill Simmons.

I don’t want to get into the quality of his writing, because any perceptive reader could tell you that his work has declined significantly over the past year or two. However, he still clearly has the capacity to be a good sportswriter. Note the prominence of the word sports in that sentence. Simmons puts together witty and meaningful pieces about sports from time to time, but we have now reached the point where he will write entire columns on “Survivor” and his everyday experiences as if there were an audience waiting eagerly to hear how his trip to the Mirage with J-Bug turned out. From the anecdotes about his friends to his experiences in college to his whiny beta-male approach to women, it is brutally apparent that regardless of whether Simmons is a good writer, his personal life is neither interesting nor cool enough to warrant mentioning in, much less to be the subject of, a column that is read by people nationwide.

But the decline of the columns’ quality wasn’t enough — we now have a cartoon that accompanies Simmons’ work on a weekly basis. Words cannot describe the ineffable crappiness of that production. Let’s take the first installment as an example: Red Sox third base coach Dale Sveum waves a runner home, only to get him thrown out . . . resulting in Simmons’ friend building to a slow burn before his head explodes. That’s it. That’s the humor. When I first saw it, I was literally dumbstruck by how lame and unfunny it was. I was even more shocked when I found out that Simmons himself wrote it. How could he possibly attach his name to a creation with that level of stupidity? ESPN hyped the cartoon as follows: “Every Thursday, you can watch Sports Guy, Sports Gal, Dad and the gang live a life you’d only want to dream about. Trust us.” Apparently, the Sports Guy’s writing is now part of ABC’s primetime TV programming schedule. Tune in for Bill Simmons’ wacky antics, right after “According to Jim!” The lack of humor inherent here is akin to the Platonic form of unfunny.

The tortured hero Red Sox fan identity? Good at the start, but overdone. The Las Vegas gambling stories? Painfully average. Vegas is full of Sports Guys. The guy at the blackjack table who comes up with funny names for the dealer. The guy who thinks staying up for 28 hours straight and smelling like cigarettes and booze is on par with a Hunter S. Thompson bender. The masturbatory intern contest takes the cake, though, where we get to see a legion of suck-up twentysomethings using their law school degrees as a platform to come up with zingers about Kevin Costner and “Lost.”

Simmons has also reneged on his promise to keep all his material free, indicated by the small orange “InDemand” boxes that appear next to virtually all of his past columns. I realize this is a financially savvy decision, but come on — he had to have at least an inkling that he would be faced with that dilemma eventually. What boggles my mind even more is that people will pay good money to read his columns, as if they had a pressing need to see how “The Shawshank Redemption” is a perfect metaphor for everything that happened in sports in the past 20 years.

If sportswriting were television, Gary Smith would be “Roots” and Bill Simmons would be “My Wife and Kids.” Even aside from the conspicuous absence of sports in his recent work, Simmons has gone from a guy who could be counted on for an occasional one-liner about A-Rod to a monotonous Jay Leno monologue. Last week, on Janu from “Survivor:” “Did she answer an ad from the MGM that read ‘Wanted: Tall, gangly showgirl who looks like Medusa’?” Ba-ZING! Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Remember, this is a guy who Jimmy Kimmel fired because he wasn’t funny enough.

My favorite counter-argument is that Simmons is good because he’s popular. If there is anything that the continued exposure of Paris Hilton and “Blue Collar TV” has taught us, it is that the American entertainment industry — and, by extension, a large portion of the public — has no concept of what is and is not incisive or intelligent humor.

The Sports Guy is not, and will never be, the end-all-be-all of American sportswriting. At least I hope not. Content delivery is changing fast, and the Simmons blog approach, wherein a writer just dumps all of his banal thoughts on mass culture onto the page, is becoming more and more popular. He has been given a forum that a lot of writers would kill for, and he uses it to expound regularly about the Real World and to make more Rocky IV references than an “E! True Hollywood Story” on Dolph Lundgren, in between trying to reconcile his sports addiction and his painfully sitcom-esque marriage. “Remember that time I wanted to watch the Celtics game instead of the OC? Boy, the Sports Gal sure was pissed about that! Ha ha ha!”

It’s not impossible to combine pop culture and sports. Simmons’ columns on the relationship between “Goodfellas” and sports and the Unintentional Comedy Scale were genius. But there comes a time when it’s just too much. That time is when you open up ESPN.com and read Monday’s Sports Guy headline, which, more than any other, is representative of the shift: “Bill Simmons takes a break from parenthood to remind you which reality TV show is still the best in the business.”

So there you have it. Bill Simmons is the guy who explains his friends’ inside jokes to his coworkers, the guy who thinks his gambling plays and last night’s episode of “Fear Factor” are appropriate topics of discussion around the water cooler. He has become a real-life sitcom character. If he is the new voice of ESPN’s inevitable move from “sports” to “sports entertainment,” just look for me at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

And if you’re looking for Bill Simmons, just check out ESPN’s Page 2. Or, more likely, you’ll see him on the next episode of “I Love the ‘90s.” Where he belongs.

Dan McCarthy is a junior. E-mail him at dmcc23@stanford.edu.