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It's been less than a week since its launch, but it's already time to say that Grantland.com is the best thing that ESPN has ever done. It's also an insanely useful resource, both for the raging sports fan in me and the professionally recognized writer I aspire to be. 

I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't eagerly awaiting its launch. Over the past 18 months or so, I've become an unabashed Bill Simmons fanboy. I was an infrequent visitor to his column beforehand, perhaps turned off by his unabashed and proliferated love for my hated Red Sox. But as time went on and the impact of both the '04 ALCS and the Yanks/Sox rivalry diminished, I gave him a chance. Soon, I found myself reading a uniquely compelling blend of the formal and casual, the disconnected and the impassioned. Within the last two months alone, I ripped through his 750-page Basketball epic and—this is quite a testimonial—his gut-wrenching opus to the '04 Sox. 

It's not Simmons' excellent writing that puts him at the top of my Olympus of contemporary sports writers; more precisely, it's what he represents. For a century of readers, the sports writing business was embodied by something antithetical to what the profession was supposed to represent. Save for the David Halberstam's and Roger Angell's of the world, fans opened up a magazine or a newspaper and read the musings of a dispassionate writer who had become worn down by the sport he once loved. 

For a vast majority of sports writers, the world they had once romanticized soon became a chore to inhabit. They could be a beat writer having to put up with cross country plane trips, unpleasant confrontations with their morally disrobed "idols," and arguments with creativity-stifling bosses. They could be columnists suffocating under the burden of objective tone and unbiased reporting. Either the sport they were covering had revealed itself as something far less than idyllic, or they had become disillusioned due to a journalistic need to separate themselves from its peaks and pitfalls. 

Enter the internet, enter Simmons. Long before the web became oversaturated and overexploited, Simmons took advantage of the platform to showcase his unique writing skills. More important, he introduced the world to a new type of sports writing and proved to the bigwigs that it was marketable. With his rabid fan perspective, Simmons eventually found himself at the precipice of the industry.

If you have ever read him (and as anything resembling a sports fan, you must), you know the story. From a part-time bartending Boston sports guy, to ESPN columnist to THE sports guy and the most widely-read sports writer of this generation, Simmons has created an industry-redefining monster. To the old guard, he's Dr. Frankenstein. To his readership and his imitators, he reinvented the wheel. 

So yes, I love Simmons, I love his writing, I love his perspective. I love the idea of being able to write about sports without losing what made it so special in the first place. I love writing, but I love sports even more.

So therefore, I liked what I figured Grantland would be: a host to his entertaining columns and occasionally excellent contributions from top-echelon writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Eggers. Then Grantland finally launched, and my lofty expectations were actualized to Olympian levels.

It’s not an accident that that was the second Olympian reference in this column. I found myself staring at a home page that is everything I've ever wanted in a website. Gone is the oversaturation of content, with a clear materialization of Simmons' mantra of "quality over quantity." Every day thus far has seen a new Simmons column in the same unfathomably readable mold as his prior work. And then, there's Grantland. 

That's not to diminish Simmons' impact or his talents. But his overbearing influence (he's also the website’s creator and Editor-in-Chief) on luring readers to Grantland is limited to his columns. And those readers were going to keep reading whether it meant they had to visit ESPN.com, Grantland or Deutschland.

Instead of having to sift through Wally Matthews’ sensationalistic columns and Stephen A. Smith’s ear-piercing solipsism, visitors to Grantland find themselves with a vastly refined experience. Type the address into your URL box, and it will become a habit. That is, until you inevitably set it as a “favorite” for quick, easy and frequent access.

Since my first visit to Grantland just minutes after its high noon Wednesday launch, I’ve been educated and enthralled with detailed first hand accounts of the genius and idiocy of The National. I found myself shaking my head in admirable disbelief at Chuck Klosterman’s account of a monumental David and Goliath upset. Or as he put it, “a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock.”

But one emotion has trumped them all: sheer pleasure at reading consistent pieces of true Golithian nature. Thanks in large part to his chumminess with those involved, Simmons has rounded up the best the industry has to offer.

Industry giant and Simmons pal Klosterman will be a headlining regular. Dave Eggers, with his elegantly simplistic take on a visit to Wrigley, has already contributed what might be the best piece of sportswriting I’ve ever read. Several writers I’d never heard of until the last few days have already shown their superior talents. After Tom Bissell’s take on hit video game LA Noire evolved into a full-fledged examination of the viability of the medium for storytelling, I fully realized what I had been missing. Nowhere in the history of video game criticism or journalism will you find anything that was 40 percent as impressive as Bissell’s (am I really saying this about a video game review?) tour-de-force.

No, it’s not all sports, all the time. You’ll find a piece about Alec Baldwin’s twitter account, and Grantland will provide constant updates of the staff “Reality TV Fantasy League.” But you’ll want to read them nonetheless. Save for a vastly different tone, these lowbrow pieces duplicate the rest of the website’s similarly highbrow writing.

As a diehard, frustrated with the watered-down sportswriting that has infiltrated today’s mainstream media outlets, Grantland is a Mecca. To anyone even remotely interested in pursuing a career in literature, it’s akin to taking a journalism course. Every day.

There are only two ways to improve writing: first, you must read. Second, you must write.

By delivering such a high level of writing on what is essentially an hourly basis, Grantland provides the ultimate double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s a forum for the best the sports writing world has to offer. On the other, it’s a virtual classroom; an opportunity to admire the proficiency of true craftsmen and attempt to amalgamate their talents into one’s own unique style.  

Did I mention that Grantland launched just over 80 hours ago?

But I don’t feel as if it’s too early to be laudatory. Assuming Grantland can keep providing similarly outstanding content in the long run, it will surpass every digital or print publication that I’ve ever read. Unbelievably, that’s actually more of a testament to Simmons’ creation than a condemnation of the rest of the not-so-competitive field.

Just three and a half days since launch, Grantland has topped my extremely tenured internet hierarchy. For as long as I can remember, my visits to my computer have always been exactly the same. I hit the power button, open up a browser and visit ESPN. I move from the homepage to the NFL page, to the MLB page to the NBA page. I check my email. Then I do whatever else it was I came to accomplish. The closest anything has come to dismantling the Caste System was the launch of ESPN New York, which inserted itself right between ESPN and Gmail as a middle class citizen. 

Today, I opened up Safari and was immediately met with Grantland’s tastefully sparse graphic design. Three years after purchasing my iMac, Apple.com had been supplanted as my homepage. An idyllic reinvention of the wheel finally stood in its place.

Jesse Golomb researches and writes for BaseballDigest.com

He is also the creator and writer of SoapBoxSportsByte, a blog that incorporates statistical analysis as well as fan perspective into daily pieces on the MLB, NFL and NBA. He can be followed on Twitter @SoapBxSprtsByte, or contacted by email at golombjesse@gmail.com.