ESPN’s president yesterday told the New York Times that the network will not offer a new contract to Bill Simmons, the most prominent sports journalist in the U.S. now and, perhaps, ever.

Simmons’s current deal, agreed to in 2010, runs out later this year and is thought to have been paying him $5 million a year, which is serious money for a sports writer.

Of course, Simmons did more than write. He ran the Grantland website. The 30 for 30 series of sports documentaries was his idea. He did NBA commentary. And his podcast was popular — and also the platform where he talked his way out of ESPN’s graces.

What happens next is what we are curious to see, and this is how I think it will shake out:

ESPN will be just fine. Of course. The company was making buckets of cash before Simmons arrived, some 15 years ago, and that will not stop. Simmons had little impact on the visual side of the company, and most people will not notice he is gone.

The preemptive “Simmons ain’t coming back” announcement was pretty much the network reacting to Simmons’s criticism of Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner.

ESPN has a $15.2 billion (with a “b”) contract with the NFL to show Monday Night Football through 2021. That makes the two companies close partners, and Simmons’s gratuitous (and ongoing) trashing of Goodell — before, during and after the Ray Rice domestic abuse case — clearly was not something ESPN was prepared to accept.

It started with Simmons calling Goodell a “liar” on a podcast last year, which led to a two-week suspension. His ESPN fate apparently was sealed Thursday when he said Goodell lacked “testicular fortitude” on live radio. ESPN’s president, John Skipper, then told NYT that Simmons would not get a new contract.

The first question I had, upon hearing this, was: What happens to Grantland? The Los Angeles-based sports/pop culture website is a Simmons project from top to bottom, and now he is going to be gone.

Short term, I’d guess Grantland will chug along. That means more long-form sports journalism and lots (and lots) of analytics-driven reporting that is sometimes difficult to wade through, both for the surfeit of numbers and arcane statistics as well as for the smug/arrogant certainty of the writers in their latest statistical toys.

Long term, I am less optimistic about Grantland.

The site will always be associated with Simmons, and ESPN may well decide that a website that apparently loses money and certainly reminds everyone of the guy who caused the company so many headaches … is something ESPN doesn’t need. Maybe a year from now, when the site is losing clicks because the rainmaker is gone, it disappears.

Which would be too bad, because Grantland fills a niche that is pretty much empty, otherwise — edgy sports reporting by smart people. (People smart enough to be updating their resumes about now.)

The B.S. Report, the Simmons podcast. That’s dead. It has his initials on it (that’s what the “B.S.: means, right?), and listeners will abandon it without the founder appearing weekly.

What literate sports fans may notice most? Simmons The Writer pretty much disappearing.

Let’s assume some other company hires Simmons. And someone will. He dominates the sports writing/commentary landscape, and even in this post-print world, that has some value.

His value, however, is in broader endeavors. You get much more bang for the bucks you give Simmons by letting him talk on TV and allowing him to think Big Thoughts about documentaries and other high-visibility projects.

He rose to fame by becoming the first talented writer to realize that the web could do what print products could not — absorb 10,000 words of irreverent, opinion-laced and pop culture-referencing commentary.

Those enormously long web commentaries, nothing at all like traditional journalism (and scorned by many of the biggest names in “old” journalism), attracted millions of hits and put him in a place where no sports journalist had gone before.

But, going forward, what made him famous doesn’t seem like the best way he can spend his time. He probably knows this already and if he doesn’t, his next employers will tell him so.

It has been several years now that his irregular Friday web posts seemed more like Simmons returning to his roots out of some sense of guilt, almost. He invariably would make a mention about fans wondering when the lazy bum would get around to writing another “mail bag”.

In his next job, I don’t see Simmons writing anymore.

Those 10,000-word screeds/rants/columns … just don’t make economic sense. Another book? Perhaps. Another website? Probably not.

TV? You bet.

It probably took him two or three days to write his Friday columns, and it was a noble effort he carried on for a couple of decades. But it makes more sense to use him as an NBA expert and, probably, as the focal point/host of a recurring sports variety/talk show. Four or five half-hour episodes, airing in prime time or even in the late-night hours.

So … ESPN is fine. Simmons will be fine, and we will see him again, probably more often than we have to date.

Grantland is in trouble.

But the biggest losers may be those tens of thousands of sports fans who for a couple of decades waited for Simmons’s monster Friday posts and their breathtaking (yes) scope and unexpected takes.

He didn’t write today. His “words” fans, and I am one of them, will have to get used to it.