Wesley Morris Named New York Times Film Critic at Large

2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Morris, will be leaving the ESPN website Grantland for the New York Times where he will be the paper's primary film critic.  Morris is one of if not the most prominent African-American film critics in the world.

Morris, a 39 year-old Philadelphia native won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his 2011 work with the Boston Globe.  Morris graduated from Yale in 1997 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Following the news of his departure from ESPN, Morris's former employer at Grantland, Bill Simmons, had nothing but praise for him.  "As a person, writer, colleague, friend, collaborator and late night hang, Wesley Morris remains undefeated.  Congrats to the New York Times." 

Morris joins a substantial list of prominent ESPN employees including Simmons who have parted ways with the company in 2015.

Morris's absence will certainly hurt Grantland and ESPN, however many have predicted a mass exodus of ESPN employees following the Bill Simmons firing.  It does however appear that ESPN president John Skipper is fully aware that the company is undergoing a transitional year.  The company brass seems to operate under the motto that nobody is bigger than the letters E, S, P, and N. And so far they are correct in that ideology, because viewership is not yet lacking.