Jemele Hill | The Atlantic

The NBA Isn’t the Same for Everyone

2026-04-08T08:00:00-04:00

Jaden Ivey started by thanking God. His thumbs were visible in the camera lens as he adjusted his phone while driving. A clear blue sky was visible through his sunroof. “Blessed morning,” he said, in a hushed tone, to the followers who’d tuned in to his Instagram livestream. “The Lord is gracious. Faithful.”

It hardly seemed like a conversation that would lead to him losing his job in the NBA. But after thanking God, Ivey quickly struck a different tone. He talked about how ESPN pundits were allowed to freely give their opinions about basketball and judge players without incident. “Do we not have free will to speak what we please?” he said, referring to the players themselves. Over the next 40 minutes, Ivey certainly didn’t have a problem speaking freely. He proclaimed that Christians were penalized for speaking righteousness while those in the LGBTQ community were celebrated for exhibiting “unrighteousness”; he used NBA teams hosting Pride nights as an example.

This was part of a particularly verbose period: In another livestream recorded later that day, he questioned the NBA superstar Stephen Curry’s Christian faith. And a couple of days before, in the comment section of a different livestream, he’d told a viewer their prayers wouldn’t be heard if they were a sinner, and he called Catholicism a “fake” religion.

On March 26, before Ivey had started streaming, the Bulls had decided that he wouldn’t play for the rest of the season because of a lingering knee issue. Shortly after the livestreams, once Ivey’s comments started to circulate both around and outside the league, the Bulls placed him on “waivers,” citing “conduct detrimental to the team.” (In the NBA, a player being put on “waivers” means they can be acquired by another team willing to assume responsibility for their contract; if no team claims them within a two-day period, they are released outright, allowing them to sign with anyone.)

Teams waive players all the time, but this transaction was received differently. In the aftermath, some of Ivey’s peers and conservative pundits came to his defense, accusing the Bulls of discriminating against Ivey because of his religion. TreVeyon Henderson, a running back for the New England Patriots, showed his support by posting a Bible verse. The conservative radio host Dana Loesch also wrote on X: “The Bulls are punishing a player for being a Christian. This is religious discrimination.” And the right-wing activist Riley Gaines wrote, “Consider me a Jaden Ivey fan.”

It’s rare to see an NBA player waived in this fashion. But Ivey’s split with the Bulls was a brutal reminder of how professional sports often work: swiftly, and unsentimentally. Ivey wasn’t some longtime favorite; he had only joined the team in February and had 13 days left on his contract at the time he was cut. Ivey was the fifth overall pick in the 2022 NBA draft for his original team, the Detroit Pistons, reflecting its high expectations for his talent. But during his short time in the NBA, his career has been sabotaged by injuries: a fractured left fibula, that tricky right knee.

As Ivey dealt with his injuries over the past few years, the Pistons emerged, without him, as one of the best teams in the NBA, making him the odd man out. The Bulls traded for Ivey in February because, on the surface, it looked like Chicago could potentially get a steal: Here was a young player who, despite the injuries, still had a lot of upside. Instead, the deal turned out to be a major bust. (On Monday, the Bulls fired general manager Marc Eversley and executive vice president Artūras Karnišovas, who were responsible for the Ivey trade.)

The bigger issue seemed to be that Ivey was becoming too much for the organization to deal with. Consider the optics of his dig at Catholicism: Roughly 29 percent of adults in the Chicago metro area identify as Catholic. (Pope Leo XIV is also from there.) Ivey’s criticism was even more curious given that his mother, Niele, is the coach of the Notre Dame women’s-basketball team. After he was cut, Ivey pushed back on the idea that he was a disruption, but reporters around the Bulls told a different story. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Ivey turned numerous routine media sessions into forums for his own beliefs. In Detroit, Ivey reportedly asked journalists whether they engaged in premarital sex; during one postgame press conference, he urged people to repent for their sins, because Jesus is coming back “when you least expect it.” One can only imagine the conversations he was having with teammates.

Many Christians took to social media to defend Ivey, saying that he was just spreading the Gospel, as Christians are tasked to do. But Ivey’s religious outpouring came amid larger mental-health struggles that he’d recently been transparent about. Last year, after suffering his first devastating leg injury, Ivey was a guest on the Sports Spectrum podcast, where he shared that he was sexually abused as a child. During an interview with the PinPoint Podcast, after the Bulls had cut him, Ivey revealed that he contemplated suicide “multiple times” after he broke his fibula. In the past few days, Ivey has shared other personal details about his life, admitting that he was once addicted to pornography and alcohol. After being waived, Ivey said his wife, Caitlyn, with whom he has three children, wasn’t communicating with him. (Caitlyn Ivey has disputed this characterization, and she was seen near him on a subsequent livestream.)

Regardless of what inspired his comments, what’s abundantly clear is that this is just another example of how, in sports, there is no room for error when you aren’t playing well. As Ivey himself pointed out during his interview with PinPoint, other NBA players have made homophobic remarks and haven’t been let go by their team. Ahead of the 2022–23 season, the Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards was fined $40,000 for using anti-gay language on his Instagram account. He apologized and that was that; Edwards would go on to average nearly 25 points a game that season.

A number of former and current NBA players have been fined or criticized for using homophobic language publicly or on social media, including Kevin Durant, Rajon Rondo, Allen Iverson, and the late Kobe Bryant. The difference is that those players had résumés that included NBA championships, MVP awards, and numerous All-Star appearances. Players of that caliber will always be given more leeway, and second chances. A 24-year-old who has played in fewer than a full season’s games over the past two years is expendable. Ivey’s potential wasn’t enough to protect him from consequences, especially when the Bulls have gotten to the playoffs only twice in the past 10 years.

[Read: How economists took over the NBA]

Besides, the argument that Ivey is being unjustly persecuted for his faith doesn’t hold much weight if you look elsewhere in the league. The Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac is one of the most outspoken Christians in the NBA. In 2020, Isaac cited his religious views as the reason he didn’t wear a Black Lives Matter T-shirt or kneel during the national anthem with his fellow players. Isaac also started a Christian-based athletic brand, criticized the Biden administration for celebrating the Transgender Day of Visibility, and spoke at Charlie Kirk’s Believers’ Summit in 2024. But Isaac remained on the Magic through all of this. It might’ve helped that the Magic is owned by the DeVos family, which is known for being deeply religious. Isaac was also helped because he contributed to the team’s success, and because his beliefs didn’t seem to be an issue in that locker room.

In Ivey, some see a martyr and an example of the NBA’s misplaced priorities. They wonder how Ivey is unemployed but someone like the Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges still has a team, despite serving a lengthy suspension after pleading no contest to assaulting the mother of his children in front of them. (“I want to apologize to everybody for the pain and embarrassment that I have caused everyone, especially my family,” Bridges said in a 2023 statement.) Supporters note that Ivey’s Bulls teammate Josh Giddey was under investigation for allegedly having an inappropriate relationship with a high-school girl in 2024 while he was a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder. (Giddey has never spoken publicly about the allegations, and charges were never filed.) That didn’t stop Chicago from trading for Giddey and then later signing him to a four-year, $100 million extension.

In sports, not everyone is treated the same, but the same rule applies to all: You can’t be a problem and not produce. When the head coach of the Bulls, Billy Donovan, was asked by reporters about Ivey’s dismissal, he expressed empathy for his former player. But, he noted, “there are certain standards I think we want to have as an organization and try to live up to those each and every day.” And those standards usually aren’t rooted in morality.

The WNBA Players Got What They Wanted

2026-03-24T07:50:00-04:00

Over the past 17 months, WNBA fans have been well justified in worrying that the league is in big trouble. As the WNBA and its players have attempted to hash out a new collective-bargaining agreement—which, among many things, dictates player compensation—negotiations have at times seemed irreparably contentious. While warming up before last year’s WNBA All-Star game, players wore Pay Us What You Owe Us T-shirts, and when the WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, presented Napheesa Collier with the game’s MVP trophy, fans could be heard screaming, “Pay them!” Not long after, Collier publicly accused the league of exhibiting “the worst leadership in the world.” If the two sides couldn’t come together in time for the new season, which typically begins in May, then the league’s tremendous momentum over the past few years would be erased—maybe for good.

But last Wednesday, following a week’s worth of marathon negotiations, the two sides verbally agreed on a deal. Yesterday, WNBA players announced that they had ratified the terms of a seven-year agreement, with more than 90 percent of players participating. Under the terms of the deal, WNBA players are in line for a significant salary boost and will receive a share of the league’s revenue that is nearly double the previous amount. Other noteworthy details of the agreement include an increase in bonus amounts for players who win the WNBA championship and postseason awards, and onetime bonuses to WNBA veterans and retired players based on years of service.

In short: The next generation of WNBA players is set to be the richest in history. The average salary will increase to $583,000, up from $120,000 last year; the most elite players will make more than $1 million a season. It took 30 years, six collective-bargaining negotiations, and lots of horror stories about shoddy accommodations, but the new agreement represents a historic moment for the league—and helps further the narrative that women’s athletes, including those not just in the WNBA, deserve better financial conditions.

Although players pre-authorized a strike, going the nuclear route would have dealt the league a devastating blow at a crucial moment. In 2024, the WNBA welcomed its most transformative draft class, headlined by the college rivals Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese; that same year, the WNBA signed a record $2.2 billion media-rights deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon. Last season, records were set for attendance and television viewership.

The league’s explosive popularity went beyond more eyeballs; it translated into actual investment from owners. Last year, the WNBA welcomed the Golden State Valkyries, its first new franchise since 2008; it also gave new WNBA franchises to Toronto, Portland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland that will be added from now through 2030. According to Front Office Sports, this has allowed the league to generate $1 billion in expansion fees since 2023. With all of that in mind, the players came to the negotiating table this time with more leverage than in the past, when interest in the WNBA wasn’t as stable.

And because of that growth, the players have new ways to get paid. Historically, many WNBA athletes have played overseas during the offseason because their American compensation is so inadequate. (Famously, the WNBA player Brittney Griner wound up detained in a Russian prison after traveling to the country to play for the club team UMMC Ekaterinburg, which reportedly paid her more than $1 million annually.) Playing so far from home isn’t something many athletes look forward to—and in 2023, the WNBA stars Collier and Breanna Stewart created the three-on-three league Unrivaled, based in the United States, which was able to attract players by offering an average salary of $220,000 for 10 weeks of play. Paige Bueckers signed a three-year deal with Unrivaled; the salary she made during her first year was more than her entire four-year WNBA rookie contract.

[Read: The WNBA has a good problem on its hands]

On top of that, an international women’s league that will supposedly offer players seven-figure salaries is looking to start later this year. Because of those emerging competitors, WNBA officials and owners were faced with a choice: Either get serious or risk eroding the foundation of a product that has slowly built up over the past three decades. Given the overall boom in women’s sports, there was increased pressure on the WNBA to meet the moment. According to a 2025 study, women’s sports grew four and a half times faster than men’s sports from 2022 to 2024. One of the best current examples is the meteoric rise of the National Women’s Soccer League, which has doubled the number of teams since 2013 and saw a 61 percent viewership increase on ESPN in 2025. The Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the husband of the tennis legend Serena Williams, started the women’s track venture Athlos, which for the past two years has held a star-studded meet in New York City. Last year’s competition drew millions of viewers across multiple platforms; the $663,000 prize purse was the largest ever offered for a women’s-only track event.

Although it’s appropriate to characterize the WNBA’s new agreement as a landmark deal, the players are still operating at a disadvantage. It’s easy for the league to look like a hero when salaries were so low for such a long time. And if the league’s popularity continues on the same trajectory, the deal will quickly wind up being an absolute bargain for the owners.

But for all of its growing pains, the WNBA is still the most visible women’s professional-sports league in America. The progress that the league has made in the past 30 years has been far from linear, and a significant gap remains between men’s and women’s sports in almost every category: revenue, investment, salary, attention. Considering the head start that men’s sports have, closing that gap will take years (for perspective: It took the NBA several decades to become profitable).

For now, both sides can share credit for striking a deal and pushing women’s sports in the right direction. As WNBA Players Association President Nneka Ogwumike wrote on social media, “We always told you we were going to stand on business, and that’s what this looks like.”

Our Olympians Are Being Put in an Impossible Position

2026-02-20T09:00:00-05:00

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) pushes the myth that the Olympics are meant to be a safe, apolitical space. Tell that to the American athletes at this year’s Winter Olympics who are being asked tough questions about the political and social turmoil in their home country.

Since the Games began earlier this month in Italy, journalists have asked a number of athletes how they feel about representing America, putting them in the tricky position of balancing national pride against their unhappiness with the actions of the current administration.

In response to a question about what it’s like to wear the American flag right now, Hunter Hess, a freestyle skier, said, “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t.” He added that he didn’t see himself as representing “everything that’s going on” in America—only “all the things that I believe are good about the U.S.”

President Trump lashed out at Hess on Truth Social, calling him “a real Loser” and saying that “he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team” if he felt that way about the country. Other conservatives piled on, including Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who wrote that Hess should “shut up and go play in the snow.” Vice President Vance—who had just been booed by crowds while attending the opening ceremony in Milan—said that athletes “should expect some pushback” for speaking out: “You’re not there to pop off about politics.”

[From the March 2026 issue: The man who broke physics]

Hess wasn’t alone in expressing discomfort when asked about the political climate in the United States. His teammate, the gold medalist Chris Lillis, said that he was “heartbroken” over ICE’s recent actions in Minnesota. At a separate press conference, the figure skater Amber Glenn, who is pansexual, acknowledged, when asked about the issue, that the LGBTQ community has been having a “hard time” since Trump returned to power: “It’s not just affecting the queer community, but many other communities.” Glenn then wrote on Instagram that she was receiving such “a scary amount of hate/threats” for her comments that she was going to take a break from social media as she prepared to compete. To the delight of Glenn’s critics, a mistake during her short program on Tuesday caused the three-time national champion to finish the segment in 13th place. “Maybe she should focus less on her sexuality, and trying to dunk on conservatives, and focus on skating,” one conservative posted on X.

Trump and other Republicans may not like that some American athletes are expressing their unease about representing the country, but it’s the administration’s actions that have made the country so hard to defend and represent.

U.S. athletes are only acknowledging what anyone can see: America’s international reputation has taken a nosedive. Many people around the world are horrified by the Trump administration’s threats to invade Greenland, the controversial capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the aggressive behavior of U.S. immigration agents, including the fatal shootings of two American citizens. Before the Games began, hundreds of people in Italy protested the news that the U.S. would be sending an ICE unit to the Olympics to assist with security. (Although the Department of Homeland Security routinely sends its agents overseas to help with major events, the demonstrations spoke to how poorly the agency is viewed outside of the United States.) Vance received a similarly frosty reception in Milan.

[Jemele Hill: The return of athlete outrage]

Despite Vance’s assertion that politics have no place at the Games, the Olympics have long been fertile ground for athletes to generate awareness about political tensions and social injustice. The most famous example comes from the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two Black sprinters, raised their fists in the air while on the podium accepting their gold and bronze medals. The moment was seen as a gesture of solidarity with the Black Power movement. It also highlighted America’s hypocrisy: They were world-class athletes competing for a country that treated them, and anyone who looked like them, as second-class citizens.

Smith and Carlos were vilified, suspended from the U.S. team, and sent home; it would be years before they were recognized as heroes. In 1975, the IOC revised its charter to forbid “every kind of demonstration or propaganda, whether political, religious or racial” at Olympic venues.

The IOC’s rules about demonstrations remained largely unchanged for decades, despite fierce debate. Then, in 2021, it issued new guidelines to allow athletes slightly more room to express their beliefs. Athletes can now broadcast their views in press conferences and on social media, but not in the Olympic Village, during competitions or in official ceremonies. With these changes, the IOC was admitting on some level that trying to separate sports from politics, especially on the international stage, is impossible.

None of the American athletes speaking up right now is violating the rules. But nevertheless, they’re being asked to account for what’s happening in this country. It’s not their fault that they can’t explain or defend it.

The Return of Athlete Outrage

2026-01-28T12:21:00-05:00

Over the weekend, the basketball star Breanna Stewart didn’t have her normal bounce during player introductions. As soon as the announcer shouted her name, Stewart walked out holding a white sign with a message: Abolish ICE.

“I think that when human lives are at stake, it’s bigger than anything else,” Stewart said at a press conference following the game with Unrivaled, a three-on-three professional basketball league she co-founded in 2024.

Stewart’s declaration was daring because it was also personal. Her wife, Marta Xargay Casademont, was born in Spain and is in the United States on a green card. The couple is working on getting Casademont American citizenship, and Stewart criticizing ICE so publicly could jeopardize her chances.

During times of political and social turmoil, the public often looks to athletes to speak out against harmful policies and actions that are directed at marginalized communities. Doing so can be risky: The Trump administration has frequently attacked and mocked athletes who challenge the president, and many team owners are among Trump’s backers.

But it can be worthwhile. Historically, when athletes have chosen to speak out, their advocacy has helped effect real change. The often-cited example of how an athlete can shift the political discourse is the boxing icon Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the Army in 1967 during the Vietnam War. In more recent times, we’ve seen stark examples of athletes changing the political dynamic with their involvement. As I wrote two years ago, in 2020 we saw athletes participating in the George Floyd protests and driving voter-registration campaigns. In Georgia, WNBA players banded together to help elect the state’s first Black senator, the Democrat Rapahel Warnock—despite the fact that his opponent, Kelly Loeffler, was a co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream at the time. Loeffler drew players’ ire when she criticized them for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. When Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha, Wisconsin, police that August, professional games across five different sports were postponed.

[Jemele Hill: What happened to the politically conscious Black athlete?]

Since 2020, there’s been a notable decrease in athletes’ social and political engagement. But now, with recent events in Minnesota, that 2020 spirit seems to be tentatively flickering back to life. For instance, earlier this month, when a federal agent killed Renee Good, the Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers called her death a “straight-up murder.”

The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti on Saturday seems to be pushing this dynamic further, and feels like an inflection point similar to the one created by Floyd’s death. At Sunday’s game between the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Golden State Warriors, a moment of silence was held, during which people in the crowd yelled “Fuck ICE!” (The game had previously been scheduled for Saturday and was postponed, the league said, “to prioritize the safety and security of the Minneapolis community.”) Every major professional sports team in Minnesota joined numerous businesses and corporations in signing a letter released by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce calling for “an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.”

The NBA Players Association also released a statement: “The fraternity of NBA players, like the United States itself, is a community enriched by its global citizens, and we refuse to let the flames of division threaten the civil liberties that are meant to protect us all.”

Besides Stewart, Tyrese Haliburton, the All-Star point guard for the Indiana Pacers, and the NBA veteran Isaiah Thomas also made strong statements on X. Haliburton posted: “Alex Pretti was murdered.” Thomas wrote: “Yall had him out numbered and decided to KILL him like it was a video game and he can just [get] his life back smh.”

With a new poll revealing that more Americans support than oppose abolishing ICE, the rejection of the agency by some sports figures is part of a more widespread shift. The mood is not the same as it was in 2020, but some sports figures are starting to realize that silence in this moment is a betrayal of their own values.

The Most Egregious Double Standard in Sports

2025-12-09T07:00:00-05:00

In college football, one rule seems to always hold: When a player leverages his power, it’s a scandal. When a coach does the same thing, it’s just business as usual.

That dynamic is now playing out in the response to the decision of the longtime University of Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin to leave the team to become the new head coach at Louisiana State University. Kiffin led Ole Miss to a historic regular-season record of 11 wins and one loss, and the university is now poised to make its first-ever College Football Playoff appearance. The Rebels have a real chance of winning a national championship. LSU’s seven-year, $91 million offer was apparently enough to put all of that in jeopardy.

Imagine, for a moment, if a player had done any of the things Kiffin did as he secured his golden ticket to LSU. Imagine if a player had been playing footsie with two conference schools, as Kiffin did with LSU and the University of Florida after both programs fired their coaches in late October. Imagine if a player’s family had boarded a private jet and been given a personal tour of the city that’s home to the school courting his services—something Kiffin’s family reportedly did in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

[Jemele Hill: A WNBA star goes scorched-earth]

Actually, we don’t have to guess, because similar scenarios have played out. When the former University of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava transferred to UCLA this past spring after reportedly holding out from practice because he wanted more name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation from Tennessee, his circumstance was used as an example of how player greed is ruining college football.

“If they wanna play holdout, they might as well play get-out,” Mario Cristobal, the University of Miami head coach, said at the time.

By contrast, while appearing on ESPN’s morning show Get Up last week, the former New York Jets coach Rex Ryan said: “I don’t blame Lane Kiffin for going after it. Look at the landscape of college football, which I think is absolutely abysmal—not just the calendar, but the fact you let kids bail all the time. You know what? I’m going to make more money if I go to this place. What is the difference?”

The difference is that during this season alone, fired college coaches have cost schools nearly $200 million in buyout money, yet nobody is suggesting any rules or protections that limit the amount of guaranteed money a coach can be paid, nor is anybody creating any rules that might curtail coaches from job-hopping mid-season. The narrative that college players seeking a system that recognizes their fair market value is ruining the sport is etched in stone, but it’s the coaches who wrote the playbook on how to leverage and exploit.

In 2019, college football was flipped on its axis by new mandates that allow players to make money off their NIL. After a slew of favorable court decisions, athletes can now be paid directly by schools, transfer universities as many times as they wish, and still be immediately eligible to play. Multimillion-dollar coaches and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) leaders have argued that the pay-for-play system is creating chaos, uncertainty, and a structure in which donors and boosters are becoming more important than the coaches themselves and players have become hired guns with no real loyalty. Ironically, it was Kiffin who unleashed a blistering critique of players while appearing on the comedian Theo Von’s podcast in August. Kiffin complained that the NIL era has made players more entitled, less motivated, and selfish.

“People get too much too early,” Kiffin told Von. “They had this drive to get to the NFL because they want to play in the NFL. They want the money. Well, I’m getting the money already. So now I’ve lost some drive.”

When asked to elaborate on the challenges players are facing, Kiffin said, “They just get in their own ways. It’s that one word, ego.” This isn’t even the first time that Kiffin has left a team in the lurch, pursuing his own interests over that of the students he leads. In 2016, while Kiffin was the University of Alabama’s offense coordinator, he accepted a job at Florida Atlantic University. His hiring proved to be a distraction, and Kiffin was fired by Nick Saban, then Alabama’s head coach, ahead of the team’s national-championship game against Clemson University.

[Sally Jenkins: How to fix the mess of college sports]

Given that history, one might assume that Saban would have stern words for Kiffin now. Instead, on ESPN’s College GameDay last month, Saban campaigned for Kiffin to be allowed to coach Ole Miss in the College Football Playoff. (Ole Miss has since announced that Pete Golding, the team’s defensive coordinator, will lead the team in the playoffs.)

Meanwhile, Saban is working closely with the Trump administration to rein in NIL; at one point, it was reported that he might be assigned to co-lead a college-sports commission that Donald Trump wanted to create. In July, the president signed an executive order that characterized the recent player-friendly changes to college sports as an “unprecedented threat.” Currently, the NCAA is urging Congress to pass the Student Compensation and Opportunity Through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act because it would grant the NCAA and its schools an antitrust exemption, thus allowing them to block players from being considered employees and prevent schools from facing further litigation. Saban has said that he is in favor of players being compensated, but earlier this year, he also called the current NIL climate “unsustainable.”

“All I’m saying: The people out there need to know this model is unsustainable. It’s not good for players,” he said on a podcast. If only he would act as though that were his true concern.

A WNBA Star Goes Scorched-Earth

2025-10-06T18:00:00-04:00

It’s rare in professional sports to see a star publicly excoriate league leadership. Last week, the Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier delivered a savage takedown of commissioner Cathy Engelbert, saying the sport had “the worst leadership in the world” and accusing Engelbert of jeopardizing player safety by failing to address concerns with poor officiating.

“The real threat to our league isn’t money,” Collier said. “It isn’t ratings or even missed calls or even physical play. It’s the lack of accountability from the league office.”

Collier’s blunt assessment—in a statement she read before reporters—comes at an inflection point for the league. Ratings continue to climb, building off the explosion in popularity that began last season with the arrival of the rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Franchise valuations have skyrocketed, and the league is adding five more teams by 2030. Last year, the league announced a media-rights deal that is reportedly worth billions. But the relationship between the players and their commissioner couldn’t be worse.

More than ever, the players know their worth—and they haven’t been shy about letting the league know it. Before the WNBA All-Star Game, the players wore T-shirts that read Pay Us What You Owe Us in reference to their ongoing labor negotiations. The current agreement expires at the end of October, and players have been demanding higher salaries and a greater share of league revenue (they currently earn less than 7 percent, compared with the roughly 50 percent that NBA players receive).

[Jemele Hill: The WNBA has a good problem on its hands]

In her speech, Collier shared the details of a private conversation she said she had with Engelbert during the offseason. According to Collier, when she asked Engelbert how she planned to rectify the fact that young sensations such as Clark, Reese, and Paige Bueckers make small salaries despite driving league revenue, Engelbert said that Clark should be “grateful” that the WNBA platform has allowed her to make millions off the court, in advertising and endorsements—even though Clark had a massive following as a college star and signed a deal with Nike worth a reported $28 million before she ever played a WNBA game. In the same conversation, Collier said Engelbert told her: “Players should be on their knees, thanking their lucky stars for the media-rights deal that I got them.”

“That’s the mentality driving our league from the top,” Collier said at the press conference. “The league believes it succeeds despite its players, not because of them.”

In a brief statement, Engelbert said that she was “disheartened” by how Collier characterized their conversations and league leadership, and that she is committed to ensuring the WNBA’s “bright future.” She later denied saying that Clark should be “grateful” for the league, and said she was establishing a task force to evaluate officiating where players would be invited to express their concerns.

Collier’s candid remarks made clear just how much the player-league relationship has soured in recent years. The players, some now household names thanks to the growth of the league (and the success of a new three-on-three league that Collier herself co-founded), hold more power. As far as they’re concerned, the league should be grateful to them for remaining committed to its success, even as it treats their well-being as an afterthought.

Players across the league voiced their support for Collier, including Clark. “I think what people need to understand: We need great leadership in this time, across all levels,” she said. “This is straight up the most important moment in this league’s history. This league’s been around 25-plus years, and this is a moment we have to capitalize on. Phee said it all with what she said, and I think the points she made were very valid.”

Many saw Engelbert’s weak response as emblematic of how she has handled concerns from players and followers of the sport more broadly. Last September, Engelbert was asked how the league planned to address racist comments and abuse leveled by fans invested in the rivalry between Reese (who is Black) and Clark (who is white). “The one thing I know about sports: You need rivalry. That’s what makes people watch,” Engelbert said. “They don’t want everybody being nice to one another.” (Engelbert later apologized, saying that her statement had “missed the mark” and that there is no place for hate in the WNBA.)

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

League leadership has long been criticized for ignoring complaints that poor refereeing has led to more and more aggression on court and players being injured as a result. Collier’s own season ended with her in a boot after she collided with a Mercury player during the last minute of a semifinal game, tearing ligaments in her ankle. Her coach, Cheryl Reeve, had to be physically restrained from confronting the officials on the court when they did not call a foul. In a postgame press conference, Reeve blasted the league for poor officiating across the board—and was slapped with a one-game suspension and $15,000 fine in return. Collier said that when she brought up concerns about officiating to Engelbert months ago, the commissioner had responded: “Only the losers complain about the refs.”

Collier’s statement was a warning: “For too long, I have tried to have these conversations in private,” she said. “The league has made it clear it isn’t about innovation. It isn’t about collaboration. It’s about control and power.”

In many ways, Collier was the ideal person to deliver this message. Not just because she’s a vice president of the WNBA Players Association, a five-time All-Star, and one of the most respected voices in the league. But because she has proved that it’s possible to pay women what they’re worth and produce a phenomenal basketball product. This January, she launched Unrivaled, a smaller league that runs in the offseason and is already valued at $340 million. The average player salary was $220,000, compared with about $120,000 in the WNBA. Having seen what’s possible—a players’ league with proper pay, cutting-edge facilities, and on-site child care—the WNBA’s stars are no longer willing to tolerate anything less.

*Sources: Brian Fluharty / Getty; David Sherman / NBAE / Getty; Geoff Stellfox / Getty.

A Censored Rap Legend Has Advice for Jimmy Kimmel

2025-09-23T13:58:00-04:00

Luther Campbell, the front man for one of the most controversial rap groups in history, has advice for Jimmy Kimmel and for any media executives trying to decide how to respond to the Trump administration’s attempts to censor disfavored speech: You’ve got to fight. He would know. When the government came after him and his music, he fought, and he won, creating a legal precedent that still protects artists and entertainers who offend the sensibilities of those in power.

In 1989, Campbell’s Miami-based group, 2 Live Crew, released their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, which included the smash hit “Me So Horny.” The album went platinum, but its sexually graphic lyrics drew widespread condemnation from conservative politicians and activists on the Christian right. Florida Governor Bob Martinez asked the state prosecutor to bring obscenity and racketeering charges against 2 Live Crew, and the Broward County sheriff warned music retailers that they could go to jail for selling it. 2 Live Crew sued, but a federal judge ruled that the album was obscene. A record-store owner was arrested for selling the album in defiance of the judge’s ruling; Campbell himself was arrested for performing songs from the album at a Florida nightclub.

“I had Governor Martinez here in Florida going after me,” Campbell, who at the time was better known by the stage name Luke Skyywalker, told me. “I had the sheriffs going after me, pretty much every Republican municipality around the country.” Campbell found himself defending not just his own interests, but a larger principle. “I was fighting to protect free speech,” he said. “It became that fight, and I’m pretty sure that right now, Jimmy Kimmel is probably feeling something similar to it.”

Of course, Campbell’s story and Kimmel’s differ in some important ways. Campbell was targeted at a moment when the supposed menace of rap music was a major topic in the culture wars. (Around the same time, Vice President Dan Quayle also pressured Time Warner to pull Tupac Shakur’s album 2Pacalypse Now because a man who killed a Texas state trooper had been listening to the album when he was stopped by the officer.) Campbell felt that he had to resist efforts to demonize certain elements of Black culture. “I was fighting it from the standpoint of a young Black man taught by my dad and my uncle how history repeats itself on a consistent basis,” Campbell said.

Campbell and 2 Live Crew appealed the obscenity ruling. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with them, ruling that their music wasn’t legally obscene under First Amendment precedent. “We reject the argument that simply by listening to this musical work, the judge could determine that it had no serious artistic value,” the court wrote.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel’s mistake]

The Kimmel situation is not about obscenity per se, but about what views can and cannot be expressed on television—and who gets to decide. Several days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel commented on his show that “the MAGA gang” had been “desperately trying” to portray the accused killer “as anything other than one of them.” Conservative activists objected. Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, publicly criticized Kimmel’s remarks as “truly sick” and threatened to go after the networks that aired his program. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said in a podcast appearance. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The companies heard the message. Hours later, Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would be pulling the show indefinitely, and ABC swiftly followed suit. (Perhaps relatedly, Nexstar is currently seeking FCC approval to acquire Tegna, another station group, for $6.2 billion.) Sinclair, which owns 38 ABC affiliates, also took Kimmel off the air and issued a statement demanding that Kimmel apologize and make a sizable donation to the Kirk family and to Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA.

Kimmel shouldn’t have implied that Kirk’s killer is a Donald Trump–supporting Republican. Nor should mistakes like that—or even worse ones—incur the selective wrath of government. Kimmel’s comments were clearly exploited as a pretext to take down someone whom the president had long considered an enemy. “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes,” Trump posted after CBS declined to renew Stephen Colbert’s late-night show earlier this year. “It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!” Similarly, he posted last week that he now wants NBC to get rid of its late-night hosts, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. Carr has warned, “We’re not done yet.”

Yesterday, however, the story took a surprising turn. After facing substantial backlash over its decision to suspend Kimmel, ABC announced that his show would return tonight (although Sinclair said it would continue to preempt Kimmel). Whether that reversal will dull the administration’s appetite for censorship or only inflame it further remains to be seen. (At an event earlier in the day, Carr seemed to be attempting to walk back his earlier comments, claiming that “the easy way or the hard way” was not intended as a threat.)

Given the unusual, high-stakes circumstances, one wonders what to expect from Kimmel once he returns. According to Campbell, Kimmel has only one option. “It’s like a boxing match,” he told me. “They threw the first punch, so now you’ve got to throw another punch. Because if you lay down, then they’re going to use this same thing against every other person on TV. This is now the precedent that they’ve set. He has to fight this to protect our free speech.”

The WNBA Superstar Who Left the Game in Her Prime

2025-09-16T09:00:00-04:00

Maya Moore walked away from basketball in the prime of her career as arguably the best women’s player in the world. She’d won two college national championships at the University of Connecticut, four WNBA titles with the Minnesota Lynx, two Olympic gold medals, and both a regular-season and WNBA Finals MVP award. When she left the league in 2019 after just eight seasons to focus on social-justice activism—which included working to overturn the conviction of an inmate whom she would then marry—fans wondered how much more damage she would have done to the record books if she had continued to play. Would she now be considered the greatest women’s player of all time?

When I interviewed her two weeks ago, ahead of her induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Moore ruminated over a different “what if”—one that she had never considered and that occurred to her mid-thought, as she was reflecting on her brilliant career. Would Moore still be playing if she’d been able to make more money in the WNBA?

“If we were getting paid more of our fair value while I was still playing,” Moore said, before her voice trailed off. She paused. “I’m not a big what-if person, but it’s actually a really intriguing what-if question.”

The prospect should be embarrassing for the WNBA. Over the course of her career, Moore made $646,000 in salary. (For comparison, the minimum one-year NBA salary during her final season was just shy of $900,000.) Under her final contract, signed when she was the women’s equivalent of Lebron James, her salary was just $117,000. During the offseason, like many WNBA players, she played overseas—in her case, in Spain, China, and Russia—to supplement her income. Playing internationally, Moore was making more each year than the value of her entire WNBA career.

[Jemele Hill: The WNBA has a good problem on its hands]

When Moore was in the league, the WNBA was still finding its financial footing, and had yet to prove that it could be a solvent league, let alone an extremely lucrative one. That dynamic has changed dramatically over the past few years. The league is in the middle of a contentious labor negotiation with its players, who want a larger piece of the revenue now that the league is enjoying record attendance, has a massive media-rights deal that kicks in next season, and has consequently seen a historic surge in franchise valuations. During WNBA All-Star Weekend a few months ago, players were criticized for wearing T-shirts during warm-ups that read Pay Us What You Owe Us.

The reaction to the T-shirts was polarizing, but the players’ show of solidarity and outspokenness is an extension of the standard Moore helped create when she played. Moore was among the early wave of athletes who strongly embraced the Black Lives Matter movement. Weeks before former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality, Moore and her Minnesota Lynx teammates engaged in their own demonstration before facing the Dallas Wings. Moore and her teammates wore T-shirts during pregame warm-ups that read Change starts with us—justice & accountability after police killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The team’s public plea was met with backlash, especially from their local police force. Four off-duty Minneapolis officers who provided security for the Lynx games walked off their posts in protest.

“That time in 2016 was a powerful time, but also an exposing time,” Moore recalled. “For us to say that Black lives matter; we’re not okay with what happened—for that to be seen as disrespecting police officers, why is that the only option?”

In 2017, Moore co-wrote an op-ed for USA Today with a district attorney and a federal prosecutor to shed light on prosecutorial misconduct and highlight her “Win With Justice” campaign, which advocated for more fairness in the criminal-justice system. It was an issue that was personal for Moore, who had become captivated by the case of Jonathan Irons. In 1998, at the age of 18, Irons had been convicted of burglary and assault and sentenced to 50 years in prison despite flimsy evidence against him.

In 2019, Moore announced that she was sitting out the season to focus “on the people in my family, as well as on investing my time in some ministry dreams that have been stirring in my heart for many years.” Her primary focus was freeing Irons. Amazingly, she succeeded. The conviction was eventually overturned, and Irons was freed in 2020. It became more than just a story of freedom and justice, but a love story as well: Moore and Irons married nine days after his release.

[Jemele Hill: What happened to the politically conscious Black athlete?]

Moore never returned to basketball, and officially retired in 2023. When Irons was freed, it was during the height of a national conversation about social justice, policing, and the criminal-justice system. Athletes, especially Black athletes, were embedded in the conversation as deeply as anyone else. But much has changed since then. Despite the political turmoil of the current moment, the widespread dismantling of DEI, and the growing right-wing acceptance of overtly racist ideas, the resistance in sports has mostly given way to capitulation. The prominent voices largely have been silent.

I asked Moore another question that’s in revisionist-history territory: Given how the movement she was part of has sputtered out, was leaving basketball for a bigger fight worth it?

“I don’t think it was wasted,” she said. “Anytime you model human dignity, you plant those seeds. It’s going to continue to grow.”

Moore might be right. At the moment, though, it’s hard to tell.

The WNBA Has a Good Problem on Its Hands

2025-07-28T09:42:00-04:00

For the first time in the nearly three-decade history of U.S. professional women’s basketball, its star players have become household names. What would it take for them to get paid accordingly?

While warming up recently for the WNBA All-Star Game, players wore T-shirts that read Pay Us What You Owe Us, in reference to the ongoing collective-bargaining negotiations between the players and the league. Until that point, there had not been much buzz about the WNBA’s negotiations, but the shirts had their intended result, taking the players’ labor fight mainstream. As the WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert presented the All-Star Game MVP award to Napheesa Collier, fans inside Indianapolis’s Gainbridge Fieldhouse booed Engelbert and chanted, “Pay them!”

Outside the arena, however, the reaction was more mixed. As the WNBA became a trending topic on X and national pundits began to weigh in, many turned out to not share the perspective of the fans at the game. Dan Hollaway, a co-host of the podcast Drinkin’ Bros, posted on X that the players should actually be paying back the team owners, given the league’s unprofitability: “Ladies, you owe, not the other way around.” Another post critical of the players’ efforts was viewed nearly 40 million times. “Imagine being an employee at a company that has NEVER turned a profit and showing up to work in these shirts,” Jason Howerton wrote.

Many critics cited a New York Post article from last October reporting that, despite the WNBA’s explosive growth in 2024—which was punctuated by the arrival of the Indiana Fever sensation Caitlin Clark—the league was expected to lose $40 million that year. A source close to the situation told the Post that the NBA, which owns a large share of the women’s league, was antsy about the WNBA’s unprofitability.

The timing of the Post’s report was interesting. It came three days before the WNBA players’ union announced that it was opting out of the current collective-bargaining agreement. To some degree, this is part of the gamesmanship that takes place whenever there is labor tension between players and owners. During the 2011 NBA lockout, owners claimed that they were on track to lose $300 million that season and had suffered similar losses since 2005. Further analysis showed that this wasn’t true, and that the league was in fact profitable.

[Jemele Hill: The one downside of gender equality in sports]

To be fair, claims that the WNBA has been unable to turn a profit during its 28 years of existence are more credible. Over that time frame, NBA owners have indeed spent a considerable amount of money to keep the league afloat. But that spending wasn’t charity; it was an investment. And the investment is very clearly about to pay off.

The 30 NBA team owners own 42 percent of the WNBA; another 42 percent is controlled by private WNBA ownership, and the remaining 16 percent belongs to an investment group that stimulated a $75 million capital infusion in 2022. Among the notable names in that investment group are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, The Boston Globe CEO Linda Henry, and Michael and Susan Dell.

The capital raise was so big because investors could see what was coming. The WNBA’s profile had already been growing steadily. Then came Clark, whose presence—and rivalry with fellow rising star Angel Reese, of the Chicago Sky—is poised to financially elevate the WNBA beyond anyone’s expectations.

Last year set popularity records for the WNBA across the board, and the growth shows no signs of slowing. In 2024, ESPN, the league’s primary television partner, saw a 170 percent boost in viewership. Overall ratings are up by 23 percent this year. Ticket sales are up 26 percent, and merchandise sales have increased by 40 percent.

The most important figure is $2.2 billion. That’s the value of the 11-year media-rights deal that the WNBA secured last year, which starts in 2026. It includes partnerships with Disney (ESPN’s parent company), Prime Video, and NBC Universal. The league also signed a separate deal with Ion Television to air games on Friday nights. Terms weren’t disclosed, but reports speculated that between the two deals, the WNBA has a media package worth close to $3 billion over the next decade.

This colossal source of revenue helps explain the immense valuations of WNBA franchises.

The WNBA will add five expansion teams by 2030. Owners in the three cities that have so far been awarded a franchise—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland—paid a fee of $250 million each to join the league. Ten of the existing 13 WNBA teams are valued at $200 million or more. The Golden State Valkyries top the list, at an estimated $500 million. The Valkyries, which in 2023 became the WNBA’s first expansion team in 17 years, are the first women’s professional sports team to ever be valued that high. They also lead the league in attendance—a sign that the sport’s popularity doesn’t depend on Clark.

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

With such outsize growth happening across the league, the fact that WNBA players currently receive a mere 9.3 percent of the league’s total revenue is embarrassing. (That works out to about $78,000 for Clark and a bit less for Reese, who are still on their rookie contracts, and just over $249,000 for the league’s highest-paid veterans.) By comparison, players in the NBA, the NHL, and the NFL all receive about half of their league’s sports-related income. Even in the Ultimate Fighting Championship—which has a nasty history of underpaying its fighters—the athletes receive 16 to 20 percent of the revenue. The WNBA isn’t yet as big as those leagues, and its players have never said they should be paid as much as Patrick Mahomes or LeBron James. Their argument is only that they deserve a similar proportion of the revenue generated by their labor.

Every professional sports league has experienced financial ups and downs, but that has never stopped the players from demanding and receiving more. The NBA was in such bad shape in the late 1960s and early ’70s that teams had to pool together money to subsidize the salaries of the league’s top players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Elvin Hayes. Heading into the early ’80s, the league’s future was precarious because of rampant drug problems among players and low television ratings. The arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird helped change all of that.

In every sports league, players have had to fight for their worth. At 28 years old, the WNBA is arguably in better shape than the NBA was at the same juncture. As the league grows, the players’ salaries should be growing right along with it.

The NBA’s Parity Paradox

2025-06-17T14:30:00-04:00

If there were any truth to the running joke—or conspiracy theory—that the NBA rigs games so that big-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers end up in the NBA Finals, then this year’s matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers would be disastrous for the league. In reality, NBA owners have gotten exactly what they wanted.

Although television ratings are down, the NBA’s plan to bring more parity to the league is working. Two years ago, owners and players signed a new collective-bargaining agreement designed to give more teams, especially those in small markets, a chance at competing for a championship. Under the new CBA, the owners made it more difficult for any individual team to load up with multiple superstars and to keep championship-winning rosters together year after year.

This is a sharp departure from most of NBA history. The league had built itself into a juggernaut on the success of big-market teams, traditional dynasties, and superstars who are household names. Parity? That was for the NFL. In the NBA’s 79-year existence, the Lakers and Celtics have won 35 championships combined. Golden State has won seven titles, including four during a seven-year span. The Michael Jordan–led Bulls ruled the 1990s by three-peating twice. And the San Antonio Spurs have won five.

[Adam Harris: Gregg Popovich’s life lessons]

The late 2000s brought on the super-team era. Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett teamed up with Paul Pierce in Boston to deliver the Celtics a title in 2008. In 2010, LeBron James and Chris Bosh, then free agents, decided to join Dwyane Wade’s Miami Heat. That team went to four straight NBA Finals, winning two of them. James’s orchestrating his and Bosh’s move to Miami created lasting animosity among NBA owners, who resented the amount of power that superstar players had begun to exercise. Small-market teams, in particular, felt that they were at a permanent disadvantage when it came to attracting top-tier players. Perhaps that was front of mind during the latest CBA negotiations. Welcome to the age of parity in the NBA.

Under the current CBA, loading up on superstars doesn’t look nearly as attractive as it used to. The culprit is something called the “second apron,” a spending limit that triggers severe punishment for a team that crosses it, on top of existing luxury taxes. For example, a team that pays its players more than the second-apron threshold can lose the ability to trade future first-round draft picks. If they remain over the second apron for two of the following four years, their upcoming draft position is automatically moved to the end of the first round.

These new rules explain why many experts think that Boston, which won the championship last year and seemed poised to establish yet another Celtics dynasty, will make significant changes to its roster this offseason. Between salaries and the luxury tax, the Celtics are looking at a payroll that will exceed $460 million for the 2025–26 season. Its star-packed roster is just too expensive to maintain.

“I think it’s a new blueprint for the league,” the Indiana Pacers center Myles Turner told the media after the Pacers eliminated the big-market New York Knicks from the playoffs. “I think the years of the super-teams and stacking, it’s not as effective as it once was.”

To Turner’s point, the most consequential player in this year’s NBA Finals isn’t Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or the Indiana star Tyrese Haliburton. It’s Paul George, a nine-time All-Star who is currently a member of the Philadelphia 76ers, the team that finished this season with the fifth-worst record in the league.

Both the Pacers and the Thunder were able to construct championship-caliber teams by trading George, who spent seven years with the Pacers and two with Oklahoma City. In 2017, the Pacers traded George to Oklahoma City for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis. The Pacers eventually flipped Sabonis for Haliburton, who was previously with the Sacramento Kings and is now Indiana’s best player. Meanwhile, the Thunder traded George to the Los Angeles Clippers, who were trying to create their own super-team featuring George and Kawhi Leonard. The Thunder got Gilgeous-Alexander, now the reigning league MVP, plus a trove of draft picks that they have used to select other excellent players. Both teams turned a big-name player into assets that reshaped their rosters, focusing more on depth, youth, and versatility than building a superstar-heavy team.

[Jordan Sargent: How the economists took over the NBA]

Another factor pushing in the direction of parity is the rise of international talent. Not too long ago, foreign-born stars were an oddity in the NBA. No longer. On opening night of this season, the league had a record-tying 125 international players on its rosters. The past seven MVP awards have gone to foreign-born players. (Gilgeous-Alexander is Canadian.) The result of adding so much talent without expanding the league is that more teams than ever have world-class players on their rosters, making it harder for any one franchise to consistently dominate.

The downside is that there may be some years where the Finals don’t have their usual buzz. The owners wanted a more equitable league in which small markets have a better shot at competing and superstars have slightly less power to cosplay as general managers. Regardless of who wins the title this season, for the owners, that might be a fair trade. That’s something that doesn’t often happen in the NBA.

The Egregious Reinstatement of Pete Rose

2025-05-21T11:44:00-04:00

When President Donald Trump applies pressure, he very often gets what he wants—and even Major League Baseball isn’t immune.

Trump has publicly called for Pete Rose to be in the Hall of Fame for years, most vocally in the past few months. Last week, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that he is lifting Rose’s lifetime ban from baseball for gambling on the game, making Rose eligible for the Hall for the first time.

As recently as 2015, Manfred had denied Rose’s request for reinstatement. What changed in the meantime? In a letter to the lawyer representing Rose’s family, Manfred claimed that Rose’s death in September—and no other factor—is what prompted him to reverse course: “In my view, the only salient fact that has changed since that decision is that Mr. Rose has recently passed away.”

[Jemele Hill: Trump has a funny way of protecting women’s sports]

But to believe that pressure from Trump had nothing to do with Manfred’s decision would require ignoring some awfully big coincidences. Shortly after Rose’s death last fall, Trump posted on X: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!” In February, Trump announced that he was going to give Rose a full pardon. (Rose spent five months in federal prison in the early 1990s for tax evasion.) Then, last month, Manfred had a meeting with Trump, during which the conversation turned to Rose. Manfred announced after the meeting that he would be ruling on a request to end Rose’s ban. Meanwhile, Congress has been holding hearings into whether the major sports leagues, including MLB, are abusing their antitrust exemption in making streaming games too expensive and inconvenient. (The commissioner’s office didn’t reply to a request for comment.)

Technically, MLB didn’t reinstate only Rose. Instead, Manfred implemented a new policy under which players who were banned for life become eligible for the Hall of Fame after dying. Fifteen other players were reinstated posthumously, but it’s Rose’s reinstatement that sends the most damning message. His pure baseball case to be in the Hall of Fame is, of course, clear-cut. Rose remains the all-time leader in hits, games played, at-bats, and singles. He won three World Series rings, twice as a member of the Cincinnati Reds and once with the Philadelphia Phillies.

But Rose violated the rule in baseball—and really all sports—that is considered the most sacrosanct: He gambled on the game. Though Rose swore he bet on baseball only when he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, and never as a player, an ESPN investigation eventually revealed that Rose did indeed bet on baseball while he was still playing.

That’s the other thing about Rose: He lied. Repeatedly. His reinstatement would be much easier to accept, even to celebrate as an example of forgiveness, if Rose hadn’t kept up the charade that he was innocent for well over a decade. Not until Rose had a book to sell did he finally admit to disrespecting the game.

Manfred’s logic in reinstating Rose is that because Rose is no longer alive, he poses no threat to the sport. “In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served,” Manfred wrote in the letter to the Rose family’s attorney, referring to the specific rule in baseball that prohibits players from gambling on the game.

[Michael Powell: An old school pitching coach says I told you so]

Huh? Rose’s death is irrelevant, because the purpose of Rule 21 is to send a message to the people who, by virtue of being alive, are still in a position to violate it. Maintaining Rose’s ineligibility even after his death sends a stronger message of disapproval than wiping his slate clean posthumously—otherwise, why would anyone have complained that he was still banned? Now that every major professional sports league has close alliances with gambling sites, and the temptation to place bets on mobile apps is omnipresent, maintaining a hard line about players gambling on the game is even more important.

During his banishment, Rose incurred a lot of public sympathy. He often painted himself as a victim. But Rose wasn’t wronged here. He agreed to accept a lifetime ban in 1989 from then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti in exchange for avoiding any official ruling that he had wagered on the game. That alone was a gift. In fact, in 2002, before he eventually admitted to gambling, Rose and then-Commissioner Bud Selig were in negotiations for a reinstatement. According to reports at the time, Rose chose not to accept Selig’s offer, because he would have had to be transparent about his gambling, stop making appearances in casinos, and cease gambling altogether. As he had before, Rose chose gambling over baseball.

Rose’s Hall of Fame fate will ultimately be decided by the Hall’s Classic Baseball Era Committee, which doesn’t meet again until 2027. Rose will need to receive 12 of 16 votes to be inducted, which is far from guaranteed. Still, considering how public perception of him has softened, the possibility is real that he becomes a Hall of Famer. The members of the committee will have to judge for themselves which facts are salient.

Trump Has a Funny Way of Protecting Women’s Sports

2025-03-04T07:30:00-05:00

Donald Trump has loudly portrayed himself as the protector of female athletes. So why is his administration preventing them from getting paid as much as their male counterparts?

The Department of Education announced recently that Title IX, the federal law that requires colleges to provide equal per-player funding for men’s and women’s sports, does not apply to name, image, and likeness payments paid directly to athletes from colleges and universities. That policy, which reverses a position adopted by the Biden administration, will cut collegiate women athletes off from a huge new source of funding set to come into play this year: Next month, a federal judge is expected to approve a $2.8 billion class-action settlement that, after years of litigation, will finally allow athletes to be receive name, image, and likeness payments from their school rather than through outside NIL collectives, the college-sports version of a super PAC.

The schools that choose to opt in to the settlement are expected to have a salary cap of up to $20.5 million each to distribute to players. Under the guidance released during the final days of the Biden administration, they would have had to distribute that money between male and female athletes in proportion to their participation rates. Now, under Trump, that money is all but guaranteed to flow overwhelmingly to male athletes, mostly football and basketball players. For example, the University of Georgia plans to give 75 percent of its revenue-sharing to the football team, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball, and the remaining 5 percent to all other sports. Other big-time sports schools are expected to follow a similar formula.

[Marc Novicoff: The logical end point of college sports]

“Without a credible legal justification, the Biden Administration claimed that NIL agreements between schools and student athletes are akin to financial aid and must, therefore, be proportionately distributed between male and female athletes under Title IX,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said in a statement. “The claim that Title IX forces schools and colleges to distribute student-athlete revenues proportionately based on gender equity considerations is sweeping and would require clear legal authority to support it.”

Indeed, to Trump, “protecting women’s sports” begins and ends with one idea: barring transgender women from competing. During his presidential campaign, Trump courted NFL- and college-football fans with a blitz of ads attacking Kamala Harris for her positions on trans rights. Shortly after taking office, he followed through on his campaign promises by signing an executive order banning trans women and girls from competing in sports. The White House touted the order as “ensuring equal opportunities for women in sports.”

In reality, the order looks like a classic Trump blend of maximum culture-war posturing for minimum tangible benefit. NCAA President Charlie Baker testified before Congress in December that out of the 510,000 athletes competing in college sports, fewer than 10 were trans. (Baker did not indicate whether they were men or women.) Even at the youth-sports level, experts estimate that the number of trans athletes is fewer than 100 nationwide.

By comparison, the Trump administration’s recent NIL guidance could affect thousands of college women, deepening an already glaring disparity. With some exceptions—such as the Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia Dunne, a social-media sensation who makes an estimated $4 million a year—female college athletes have had a difficult time keeping pace with their male counterparts in the new era of NIL money. NIL collectives are typically financed by wealthy boosters and donors who care primarily about men’s basketball and football. Even though the economic value of women’s sports has grown dramatically in recent years, women still don’t get the same attention or brand opportunities as men. Women’s sports still receive only about 15 percent of total sports-media coverage.

Women are concerned that they won’t have much of a voice as revenues in their sports grow. In January, a group of more than 100 female Division I athletes sent letters to the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference commissioners requesting a meeting and expressing their concerns about a variety of issues, most notably the disparity in NIL money between male and female athletes. So far, the commissioners have not agreed to a meeting.

[Jemele Hill: The one downside of gender equality in sports]

“My first impression is that Title IX is being used to an extent to feed the culture and political ideological differences in our country,” Ajhanai Keaton, an assistant sports-management professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, told me. “If it is an educational enterprise, there shouldn’t be any question that money should be split evenly between the genders in sports.”

Some would argue that women being unable to keep pace with men in NIL money is just the free market at work, given the indisputable popularity of football and men’s basketball. On its face, a school like Georgia giving the majority of its revenue-sharing to the football team makes sense, because football accounted for about three-quarters of the Bulldogs’ $203 million in revenue last year, the fifth-most among major college football programs. But the tendency of the free market to reinforce existing inequalities is exactly why laws like Title IX exist.

Even before the rise of NIL money, college sports were failing to live up to the law’s mandate. According to a report released by the Government Accountability Office last year, women account for 56 percent of undergraduates but only 42 percent of student athletes. And in 2022, a USA Today report on Division I sports concluded that for every $1 schools spent on travel, equipment, and recruiting for men’s teams, they spent just 71 cents on women’s teams.

In the pandemic season of 2021, men’s and women’s basketball players played their March Madness tournament in separate, isolated “bubbles.” The men’s players were given an enormous, well-stocked gym befitting top athletes, while the women were given only a few yoga mats and a tiny rack for dumbbells. After the obvious disparities were blasted on social media, the NCAA commissioned an outside firm to conduct a gender-equity review. The unfairness turned out to extend to the meal plan. “The portions originally were very small,” an unnamed women’s coach said in the report. “I didn’t ask the men’s team about the food. I saw a buffet on Twitter … I would love to be in a buffet situation.”

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

The NCAA apologized for the weight-room disparity, but the clear takeaway was that even though the broadcast rights for women’s basketball bring in an estimated $65 million a year, the organization still willingly chose to provide substandard resources for female athletes.

When Trump signed his executive order on transgender athletes, he made sure to pack the East Room of the White House with young girls. It made for a good photo op. But the administration’s actual policy agenda will mean fewer opportunities for those girls, not more. If all of this is Trump’s idea of protecting women, then it’s fair to say that female athletes are officially on their own.

Football Won’t Save Tua Tagovailoa From Himself

2024-09-19T09:12:00-04:00

It was a terrifying but sadly familiar scene: Tua Tagovailoa, the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, lying on the field, apparently disoriented, after suffering another concussion. The injury, sustained in a game last week against the Buffalo Bills, was Tagovailoa’s fourth diagnosed concussion since 2019 and his third since becoming an NFL player, in 2020. It seemed like the ultimate sign that Tagovailoa should end his promising NFL career, only two games into his fifth season.

That appears to be the prevailing sentiment even among the NFL brotherhood. Dez Bryant, a former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, posted on X: “That’s it … NFL go ahead and do the right thing. Tua has had entirely way too many concussions. He need to retire for his longevity health concerns.” Antonio Pierce, the Las Vegas Raiders head coach and a former NFL linebacker, told reporters that if he were in a position to influence the quarterback’s thinking, “I would tell him to retire—it’s not worth it.”

The fact that so many voices within football are calling for Tagovailoa to quit is a small sign of progress. Players finally seem willing to buck the old hyper-macho culture of playing through any injury.

But no mechanism exists for the league or anyone else to decide how many concussions are too many, and there’s no guarantee that Tagovailoa will choose to retire. Football players eagerly sign up to play a violent game despite having a much fuller understanding of its risks than their predecessors did. And if you think the sight of Tagovailoa writhing on the ground is enough to turn fans off in any sort of meaningful way, then you underestimate the power of a sport that remains firmly entrenched as the national obsession.

Tagovailoa will have time to think about his future. On Tuesday, the Dolphins placed him on injured reserve, which means he will miss at least the next four games before he is eligible to return to NFL action. Because of Miami’s scheduled bye week, the earliest Tagovailoa could return is on October 27, against the Arizona Cardinals. The break should allow Tagovailoa not only to recover from the injury and go through the league’s concussion protocol, but to discuss his options with outside neurologists and, presumably, his family.

[Read: The standard advice for concussions is wrong]

Whatever he decides, concussions and the risk of long-term brain damage clearly remain a part of football. The NFL’s efforts to address the problem have ranged from incomplete to untrustworthy.

Nearly a decade has passed since the NFL agreed to settle a massive lawsuit brought by 4,500 players who accused the league of hiding the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE —the degenerative disease that can affect people who suffer repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries. The NFL has since implemented a host of rule changes in an effort to make the game safer, but head injuries remain an all too common part of the game. That hasn’t stopped NFL ratings from continuing to rise. The players, for their part, appear to have mostly accepted the danger. Tagovailoa’s concussion last week came after he crashed headfirst into the chest of the Bills safety Damar Hamlin, whose heart stopped on the field last season after he suffered a severe blow to the chest. Hamlin had to be administered CPR after that injury and came very close to dying on the field. Now he’s back out there, delivering hits of his own.

The NFL has shown that it can’t be relied on to prioritize the well-being of its players. The league and the Dolphins drew widespread criticism for their handling of Tagovailoa’s multiple concussions throughout the 2022 season. During another game against the Bills, the back of Tagovailoa’s head slammed into the turf at the end of a play. After getting up, the quarterback stumbled and fell on his way back to the sideline, visibly shaken up. And yet the team’s medical staff allowed him to return to the game, and the Dolphins announced, implausibly, that he had suffered a back injury. A mere four days later, in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa took a brutal hit to the head. He was diagnosed with a concussion, prompting speculation that he had already suffered one against the Bills.

[Nate Jackson: I saw horrific things when I played in the NFL]

The NFL and the NFL Players Association launched an investigation into why Tagovailoa continued to play against the Bills, which led to the NFL changing its concussion protocol to include “abnormality of balance/stability, motor coordination or dysfunctional speech” as symptoms that would prohibit a player from returning to the game. This was a positive step, but clearly not enough. A few months later, Tagovailoa suffered his second NFL concussion—or third, depending on your opinion about that Bills game. While playing the Green Bay Packers, Tagovailoa again hit his head on the ground. But he wasn’t evaluated immediately for a concussion, and therefore was never removed from that game. The diagnosis came the next day.

The NFL has paid out more than $1 billion to nearly 2,000 former players and their families as part of its concussion settlement. But an investigation by the Washington Post reporter Will Hobson found that the league was still failing to meet its promise to compensate former players who suffered from CTE and other brain diseases linked to concussions. After reviewing 15,000 pages of documents and interviewing more than 100 people involved with the settlement, Hobson found that the “settlement routinely fails to deliver money and medical care to former players suffering from dementia and CTE.” In 2020, the NFL had been accused of using “race norming” to determine concussion settlements: assuming Black people have lower baseline cognitive ability, therefore making it harder for Black players to prove that they were suffering mental decline because of football. The league agreed to end the practice in 2021.

Football isn’t going to save Tagovailoa from himself. The quarterback worked hard after the 2022 season to learn how to better avoid injury. He did jiu-jitsu training to learn how to fall safely. He gained weight to make himself sturdier. For one year, his efforts appeared to pay off: He didn’t miss a single game during the 2023 season and became the first Miami Dolphins quarterback to be selected for the Pro Bowl since Dan Marino in 1995. This past summer, the Dolphins, evidently feeling more confident in their quarterback’s ability to stay healthy, rewarded Tagovailoa with a four-year, $212 million contract extension.

Tagovailoa would forfeit most of that money were he to decide to walk away from the game. No one should pretend that it’s an easy choice to make. And no one can make it but Tagovailoa himself.

What Happened to the Politically Conscious Black Athlete?

2024-09-10T16:12:00-04:00

If there’s one demographic that Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have locked up, it’s the Golden State Warrior vote. Steve Kerr, the team’s head coach, gave a speech endorsing Harris at the Democratic National Convention, and the superstar point guard Steph Curry beamed in his own message of support via video. Curry’s teammate, the boisterous but relatively apolitical power forward Draymond Green, spoke up for the vice president on his podcast last month.

Outside the Bay Area, however, Black athletes have largely avoided getting involved in the presidential election. Four years ago, many of them refused to be silent about politics. This time around, silence seems to suit them just fine.

The 2020 election may have been the high-water mark for Black athletes’ political engagement. The killing of George Floyd triggered the biggest mass-protest movement in American history. Donald Trump seemed to interpret the movement as protesting him—“People are tired of watching the highly political @NBA,” he tweeted in September 2020—which became a self-fulfilling prophecy and blurred the line between opposing police brutality and opposing Trump. Dozens of prominent athletes spoke out, and a group led by LeBron James launched More Than a Vote, an organization dedicated to increasing Black turnout and fighting voter suppression.

Politics and sports collided most powerfully in Georgia’s Senate race that year. The Democrat Raphael Warnock, a relative unknown, was running against Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, at the time a co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. As the incumbent in a Republican-leaning state, Loeffler seemed likely to hold on to her seat, but she drew the ire of WNBA players by criticizing their involvement in Black Lives Matter protests. In response, the Dream and players across the league organized wide-scale support for Warnock by wearing Vote Warnock T-shirts during their nationally televised games and discussing his platform with the media in interviews. The Warnock campaign credited the effort with triggering a spike in interest and donations. In the decisive runoff election in January 2021, Warnock narrowly defeated Loeffler to become Georgia’s first Black senator. (A few weeks later, the Dream was sold, requiring Loeffler to give up her stake.) Warnock’s victory allowed the Democratic Party to gain control of the Senate through a 50–50 split, with Harris serving as the tiebreaker. That thin control paved the way for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman to serve on the Court.

The energy motivating the Black sports world in 2020 has been hard to find heading into this year’s election. This was in part a microcosm of Joe Biden’s more general struggles with young and minority voters. But even as polls show Harris improving among those demographics, athletes are still nowhere near as involved as they were last time. That’s unfortunate, because the issues they were speaking out about in 2020 have not disappeared over the past four years—and Trump has not suddenly changed his positions on them.

The former president has an extensive track record of belittling outspoken Black athletes. He was a driving force behind the quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s NFL exile and even referred to the NFL players who’d protested alongside Kaepernick as “sons of bitches.” He has publicly attacked the intelligence of James and in 2021 accused him of being “racist.”

Far from being chastened by the 2020 protests, Trump—who passed a criminal-justice-reform bill in 2018—seems to have only dug in harder on his opposition to police accountability. At a rally this past May, Trump promised a crowd of supporters, “We’re going to give our police their power back, and we are going to give them immunity from prosecution.” Last week, he called for a return to stop-and-frisk policing.

Then, this past Sunday, as if on cue, the sports world was reminded how easy it is for police to abuse their power over Black men.

[Jemele Hill: The NFL’s dubious rhetoric about race]

A few hours before the Miami Dolphins’ home opener, their superstar wide receiver Tyreek Hill was pulled over on his way to the stadium for speeding. Police bodycam footage shows one of the cops getting angry when Hill refuses to keep his window open, then yanking him out of the car. Within seconds, Hill is face down on the pavement, getting handcuffed.

Hill did nothing to warrant the police tackling him to the asphalt, putting a knee on his back, and even handcuffing his teammate Calais Campbell, who’d tried to peacefully intervene. Perhaps this episode will remind Hill and his fellow Black athletes that their wealth and fame do not shield them from police abuse.

Enthusiasm for Harris seems highest among women athletes so far. This may be something of a self-inflicted wound for Trump, who largely declined to invite women’s-championship teams to the White House and went on a Twitter rant attacking the soccer star Megan Rapinoe after she criticized him in 2019. After the U.S. women’s national soccer team lost in the second round of the 2023 World Cup, due in part to a missed penalty kick by Rapinoe, Trump gloated on Truth Social about its defeat: “Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”

Women athletes who were no fan of Trump’s to begin with seem more ready to rally around a female candidate. Some WNBA players are wearing T-shirts supporting Harris. Others have vowed to get more involved. “I was already voting for democracy,” Renee Montgomery, a former Atlanta Dream player who is now a part-owner of the team, told me via text. “With VP Harris’ name at the top of the ticket, I’m ready to turn up.”

Last month, Nneka Ogwumike, a forward for the Seattle Storm and the president of the WNBA Players Association, took over the leadership of More Than a Vote. A source inside the organization, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the group, told me that there is more excitement because of Harris. “It definitely galvanized us,” they said. “It made a huge difference, because there was a significant enthusiasm gap between Biden and Harris.”

Black male athletes, however, including those who publicly tout their commitment to activism and social justice, have yet to show that they prioritize this November’s election as highly as they did the previous one.

Give James credit for handing the reins of his organization to a woman during an election in which women’s reproductive freedom is a potentially decisive issue. But he hasn’t yet found other ways to get involved personally, setting an example for his tens of millions of fans.

Harris appears to have made some genuine effort to connect with the sports community. Last year, she traveled to Los Angeles to see Brittney Griner play in her first regular season game after being released from prison in Russia. After the game, Harris commended Griner for her strength and courage. (Trump, in contrast, called Griner, who had participated in BLM protests in 2020, “spoiled,” and suggested that she wasn’t worth freeing.) This past March, Harris co-hosted a reception with the Women’s Sports Foundation to honor more than 100 women in sports.

No candidate is entitled to anyone’s support. Harris can’t take Black athletes for granted just because she’s Black too. If they haven’t fully rallied to her side, she may need to work harder to win them over. Still, it’s fair to wonder what prominent Black athletes are thinking right now. They believed in 2020 that it was important to use their influence. Have they changed their mind?

The One Downside of Gender Equality in Sports

2024-06-03T14:05:00-04:00

As a female journalist who has covered women’s sports for years, I have long dreamed of the day that female athletes would demand the level of media attention traditionally reserved for men.

Now that day is finally here—and it’s a lot less satisfying than I imagined.

The arrival of a dynamite WNBA rookie class, headlined by the sensational Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has prompted an explosion of coverage of women’s basketball. But—and perhaps I should have anticipated this—the surge in popularity has come at a cost. Ill-informed male sports analysts are suddenly chiming in about the league and its players, offering narratives untethered to facts and occasionally making me long for the days when the WNBA largely flew under the radar.

Much of the discourse revolves around Clark, the former University of Iowa star who became the all-time college scoring leader this season and is one of the most remarkable players the sport has ever seen. A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA players, particularly the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the attention she has been getting, when they should be groveling at her feet. A few weeks ago, for example, the Hall of Fame former player and beloved commentator Charles Barkley accused WNBA players of being “petty” and declared, “Y’all should be thanking that girl for getting y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

That narrative escalated over the weekend during a matchup between Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, and the Chicago Sky, which features Reese, who has been Clark’s nemesis since they faced off in the NCAA championship game two years ago. During Saturday’s game, Reese’s teammate Chennedy Carter leveled Clark with a body check during a stoppage in play. Reese, who was on the bench at the time, leaped up to applaud the cheap shot. (The Fever went on to win.)

Carter and Clark had been mixing it up throughout the game, but things should never have escalated to that point. The hit was dirty and should have been flagged as a flagrant foul in the moment rather than upgraded after a postgame review. Reese’s reaction, while perhaps unsurprising given her long-running personal rivalry with Clark, was inappropriate. But instead of analyzing the incident for what it was—intense competition gone wrong—the male punditocracy rushed to assign collective blame to the legions of Clark’s supposed haters around the league.

The former NBA player turned analyst Austin Rivers, for example, posted a video ripping female players for their lack of gratitude. “If you girls were Destiny’s Child, she would be Beyoncé,” he said. Instead of hating on Clark, he added, WNBA players needed to “appreciate her. It’s about that time. We need to grow up and move on. Pay respect.”

In men’s sports, of course, tough defense, physical play, trash talk, and personal rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA history is filled with stories of personal grudges, including some that featured plenty of dirty play and have lasted well past athletes’ playing days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These stories are embraced and told with affection. In fact, one of the criticisms that some fans have of today’s NBA is that the players have gotten too friendly and the game itself too soft. When it comes to hard-nosed play against Clark, however, male pundits seem unable to see women as fierce competitors. They just see mean girls.

(Reese herself has been on the wrong end of some “Welcome to the league” fouls, most recently a throat-grab body slam by the Connecticut Sun’s Alyssa Thomas. “They don’t give a damn if I’m a rookie,” Reese said afterward. “They’re not supposed to be nice to me.”)

As more and more male pundits opine on women’s basketball, some of the analysis is just plain cringeworthy. In April, in the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament, Clark put up 41 points and 12 assists in a decisive victory over Louisiana State University, the defending champion. After the game, the NBA Hall of Fame player Paul Pierce offered scintillating analysis on the Fox Sports 1 talk show Undisputed. “I’mma just keep it 100 with you,” Pierce said. “We saw a white girl from Iowa do it to a bunch of Black girls. That gained my respect.” His fellow panelists nodded in agreement.

A white woman dominating Black opponents in women’s college hoops sure does sound remarkable—unless you know anything at all about the history of the sport. Women’s college ball has been littered with dominant white players. In 2021, the University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers, a favorite to be the top pick in next year’s WNBA draft, was the first freshman woman to win the John R. Wooden Award, given to the best player in the nation. Breanna Stewart, the reigning WNBA MVP, won four straight national championships and three national player-of-the-year awards at UConn. The NCAA women’s record holder for most career points before Clark was Kelsey Plum, a white point guard who now plays for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces.

[Jemele Hill: Women’s college basketball is a worthy investment]

At least Pierce’s comment, however ignorant, was meant to be complimentary. The same can’t be said of the more recent avalanche of male punditry, which drips with condescension and stereotypes about women’s behavior. After Clark’s team lost its first several games of the season, for example, some male analysts suggested that the league should be rigged to allow Clark to succeed, for the benefit of the sport’s popularity.

“The WNBA is playing this all wrong,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague said on his podcast, Club 520. The league, he said, should mimic professional wrestling, pulling its punches against Clark. “It’s supposed to be like WWE. Y’all are supposed to play hard against her but let her kill.”

The Fox Sports radio host Colin Cowherd made a similar argument on the air a few weeks ago. The WNBA had erred, in his view, by making Clark play against strong competition to begin the season. “So they finally have this moment,” Cowherd said. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up in the first four games against New York twice and Connecticut twice, the best defensive teams.”

What Cowherd may not realize is that the WNBA has only 12 teams, and the top eight qualify for the postseason. There just aren’t a lot of weak links. Clark’s team is one of the few, which is why they’ve had the top pick in the draft the past two years. In the WNBA, just like in men’s sports, the best college players tend to have to take their lumps for a few years on a lousy team. No one was saying that the NBA should go easy on Victor Wembanyama’s lowly San Antonio Spurs this past season.

Now, in fairness, Cowherd wasn’t saying that the WNBA should pamper Clark just because she’s a woman. In fact, he claimed, men’s professional leagues pull these kinds of shenanigans all the time. The NFL purposely gave the Chicago Bears an easy beginning-of-season schedule this year, he said, so that their new quarterback, the No. 1 draft pick, Caleb Williams, could get acclimated before facing tough competition or appearing on national TV. Likewise, Cowherd said, when Major League Soccer wanted to make sure that Lionel Messi ended up on a major market team, it ignored salary-cap rules so that Miami could sign him to a big contract.

This analysis was even sillier than his WNBA commentary. The Bears will be on prime-time national TV in the second week of the season, facing the Houston Texans, a playoff team that won its division last year. As for Messi, the MLS has set aside non-salary-capped slots for star international players since 2007. So at least Cowherd didn’t limit his wacky, fact-free theorizing to just women. Maybe that’s progress. Maybe the fact that the WNBA is finally being subjected to the same absurd, often ignorant debates as men’s sports is just what equality looks like.

Still, it rankles. When I hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter in 2017, any time I flubbed a name or statistic, legions of viewers would declare on social media that it was proof that women shouldn’t be discussing men’s sports. Men, by contrast, are allowed to laugh and even brag about how little they know about the women’s game. Last month, the ESPN talk-show host and former NFL punter Pat McAfee posted from the sideline of a New York Liberty game: “Has this Liberty team ever lost?” he wrote on X. “This might be the greatest team assembled of all time.”

I’m glad McAfee was enjoying “the W,” as the WNBA is often called. The Liberty are indeed a very good team. So good, in fact, that they made the WNBA finals last year—where they got smoked by the Aces, who are going for their third straight WNBA title this year. So, yes, this Liberty team has lost. When the WNBA analyst Carolyn Peck called him out, McAfee replied sarcastically, “I and my show will not speak about the W until we know everything about it.”

Look, he might have a point. Perhaps longtime women’s-sports fans should stop holding male pundits to even the most basic standards of knowledgeability. I mean, we wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful that men are finally paying attention. That would just be petty.

The O.J. Verdict Reconsidered

2024-04-13T16:56:00-04:00

When the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced, I was a junior at Michigan State University. At the time, I was the managing editor of my college newspaper, The State News, so I didn’t have the luxury of reacting emotionally one way or the other. I had the responsibility of figuring out how our publication was going to present to 40,000 students this stunning outcome to what many had called “the trial of the century.”

But as I watched the verdict on the TV in our college newsroom, I immediately understood why some of the white staffers on the paper reacted with visible disgust—and why a lot of my Black friends felt relieved, even joyous, that Simpson had been found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Although back in 1995, everyone was aware of the racial divide in this country, the trial provided stark evidence of just how sharp it was.

As a student journalist, I understood that this was a significant piece of the story. The predominantly African American jury’s not-guilty verdict seemed inseparable from the deep distrust Black people had in law enforcement, but I did not see it as a moment to celebrate. Simpson’s football achievements had received due recognition—he was a Heisman Trophy winner and an NFL Hall of Famer. But athletic prowess aside, he had long since purposefully distanced himself from the Black community, and he seemed to revel in his exceptional proximity to white America. To my mind, the message that the verdict sent about Black skepticism toward the criminal-justice system couldn’t be detached from its far-from-ideal messenger.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: What O. J. Simpson means to me]

When Simpson’s death was announced by his family on Thursday, the racial divide that the trial had exposed came back to the surface. The CNN contributor Ashley Allison, a policy adviser for former President Barack Obama who had also worked on President Joe Biden’s campaign, said on air that the Simpson trial “represented something for the Black community” because it put a spotlight on the racial inequity that Black people commonly face in the criminal-justice system. Marc Lamont Hill, an anthropology and urban-education professor and a media commentator, summarized Simpson’s career on X in this way: “O.J. Simpson was an abusive liar who abandoned his community long before he killed two people in cold blood. His acquittal for murder was the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system. But he’s still a monster, not a martyr.” Both were harshly criticized by right-leaning outlets. Despite a steady supply of evidence that the criminal-justice system does indeed treat Black people differently, when Black advocates point this out in the context of the Simpson case, they still draw condemnation.

Torrey Smith, a former NFL player who is also Black, blasted media outlets for relying heavily on Simpson’s courtroom photos in the coverage of his death—in his view, relitigating Simpson’s acquittal. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner, whose ex-wife, Kris Jenner, was best friends with Nicole Brown Simpson, posted “Good Riddance” on her X account. The fact that we’re still arguing about O.J. shows that we haven’t come as far as we should have, in part because too many white people misunderstand the reaction among many Black people to his acquittal in the first place.

What they miss is that if Black people cared about Simpson’s trial and the way it exposed cracks in the criminal-justice system, they never cared much about Simpson the man. As a sports journalist, I’ve talked to countless people over the years about these questions. I’ve found that Simpson was not the cultural fixture in the Black community that some white people assumed he was, and apparently continue to assume he is. As Simpson liked to tell people, “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” I took Simpson at his word and so did many others.

[Jake Tapper: Finally, justice]

By comparison, such notorious abusers as Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and now Diddy have a much stronger cultural hold. All three have been accused of abusing women (in Kelly’s case, actually convicted), yet some ambivalence persists in the Black community about their status and their work—each still has defenders or fans who seem willing to either stick by their icon or withhold judgment.

With Simpson, no such relationship exists. Just because many Black people believe that his acquittal was the proper verdict—and, yes, some celebrated when it came down—doesn’t mean that Simpson was our guy. And who was that guy? In 2008, Simpson was convicted of multiple charges relating to an armed robbery in which he and associates broke into a Las Vegas hotel room to retrieve items that he claimed had been stolen from him. Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison but served about nine before being released in 2021.

Some people may have seen his conviction and imprisonment in that case as some sort of payback for his murder acquittal, but—in my circles, at least—practically no one claimed Simpson as a misunderstood political figure, let alone a hero. With his career as a sports commentator, his appearances in ads, and his movie roles, O.J. achieved an almost unique level of acceptance—as a celebrity, he arguably meant more to white America than he did to Black America. So if anything, in my experience, some white Americans seemed more upset than Black people ever were that Simpson wasn’t who they thought he was.

Put simply, he was a once-great athlete who turned out to be a terrible person. The mingled legacy of his celebrity and criminality is that his murder trial forced our country into difficult conversations—particularly about domestic violence and how, regardless of race, fame can protect people like Simpson from consequences. Above all, though, Simpson’s death is a reminder of how far this country still has to go to heal the racial rift that his murder trial so mercilessly exposed.

Women’s College Basketball Is a Worthy Investment

2024-04-13T08:00:00-04:00

The NCAA women’s-basketball season officially concluded a banner season on Sunday with breathless drama, even though it wasn’t a surprise ending.

In a season stocked with unprecedented highs, the heavily favored University of South Carolina Gamecocks won the national championship over the University of Iowa. A slew of viewing records were set as millions witnessed the entire sport reach a new zenith thanks to the massive popularity of the Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, the Gamecocks’ dominance, and the dynamic personalities of Louisiana State University.

But now what?

Clark’s brilliant college career is now over. She is the presumed top pick in next week’s WNBA draft. South Carolina is etched in the record books as the 10th program in Division I history to complete an undefeated season and the fifth program in women’s-college-basketball history to win three national titles. And Angel Reese of LSU—who lost her bid for a second straight national championship after Clark’s Iowa beat her team in the Elite Eight—is moving on to the WNBA, where she is expected to be a lottery pick.

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

Women in this sport have been told for decades that if they just give people a fantastic product to watch, charismatic personalities, and compelling storylines, then they will be rewarded with the same attention and investment that has been automatic for the men. It’s the old chicken-or-the-egg argument, but it hasn’t mattered whether the women are the chicken or the egg—the investment hasn’t matched the quality of the product the women have presented.

Things have to be different now. This was possibly the greatest women’s-college-basketball season ever, as evidenced by the blockbuster ratings delivered in this year’s NCAA tournament. For the first time, more people watched the women’s national championship game than the men’s, marking the third time over the course of the week that the women set a television-ratings record. It was the natural punctuation to a season in which audiences for women’s games jumped 37 percent across ESPN platforms, and women’s-basketball games on Fox networks averaged more viewers than the men.

After last year’s national-championship game between LSU and Iowa garnered a then-record 9.9 million viewers, there was some skepticism about whether the women could continue to deliver those same gigantic ratings. Instead, they did even better. Last week’s much-hyped rematch between Iowa and LSU drew 12.3 million viewers. Four days later, more than 14 million people watched Clark bounce the perennial power University of Connecticut from the NCAA tournament. And then for Sunday’s championship game, the women delivered a rating that’s more likely to be associated with the NFL. The South Carolina–Iowa game averaged 18.7 million viewers.

Not only was the final the most-watched women’s-basketball game of all time and the most-watched basketball game overall since 2019, but these games delivered more viewers than last year’s NBA Finals and all but four college-football games during the 2023 season.

“It’s a moment, like people are saying, but it’s more than a moment, you know?” Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma told reporters. “Sometimes moments become minutes, and minutes become hours, and hours become days. And the next thing you know, it becomes part of the national pastime.”

Unfortunately whenever these moments have occurred in the past, they didn’t necessarily drive the NCAA and the media to give the women the necessary resources and attention. In 1983, the basketball legend Cheryl Miller of the University of Southern California made her debut on national television against Louisiana Tech, the first women’s-basketball team to win an NCAA national championship, the year before. With the championship on the line, the Trojans beat the Lady Techsters—yes, they were called that then—and Miller won her first title as an electrifying USC freshman. Airing on CBS, the game attracted nearly 12 million viewers.

It would have been a perfect opportunity for the organization to elevate a signature women’s sport. All the ingredients were there—a dynamic player in a major media market (Los Angeles), and a dominant rival. But rather than build on the success, the NCAA spent years prioritizing, promoting, and cultivating the men’s-basketball tournament.

Those were not the only opportunities to nurture the women’s game and put it on par with the men. In 1995, the women’s national-title game between Connecticut and then-rival University of Tennessee attracted 7.4 million viewers, back when the women’s Final Four aired exclusively on CBS. The following year, the women’s national basketball team won gold at the Olympics in Atlanta. Then ESPN took over the NCAA tournament as part of a seven-year, $19 million deal, expanding the competition’s reach. And although ESPN certainly deserves credit for helping amplify the women’s game, last year was the first time the network decided to air the championship game on ABC, which played a huge role in the ratings explosion.

[Read: The Title IX loophole that hurts NCAA women’s teams]

Women’s basketball’s struggle to gain its own territory has been a rewarding one. In 1997, the WNBA made its debut, but as the game grew in viewership and talent, the NCAA seemed slow to make changes that would accelerate that growth. It wasn’t until three years ago that the NCAA decided to brand the women’s tournament with its well-known marketing slogan “March Madness,” once reserved for the men. The women’s tournament field also was finally expanded to 68 teams in 2021—a decade after the men had done it.

But these changes didn’t come because the NCAA realized what it had. They came because the NCAA got publicly embarrassed. In 2021, both the men’s and women’s tournaments were conducted in bubble environments because of the coronavirus pandemic. Several women’s players and administrators at the NCAA tournament called out the organization on social media for the obvious disparities in weight-room facilities. The men’s players were given an enormous, well-stocked gym befitting top athletes, while the women were given only a tiny rack for dumbbells and a few yoga mats. The NCAA apologized after receiving a barrage of criticism, but the optics were so disastrous that it was pressured into commissioning an outside firm to conduct a gender-equity review.

The assessment revealed that “the NCAA’s broadcast agreements, corporate sponsorship contracts, distribution of revenue, organizational structure, and culture all prioritize Division I men’s basketball over everything else in ways that create, normalize, and perpetuate gender inequities.” The report also noted that the budget for the 2019 men’s-basketball tournament was more than double that of the women’s, feeding the perception that the men were “worthy of increased investment.”

The evaluation estimated that the annual broadcast rights for women’s basketball would be worth $81 million to $112 million in 2025. Earlier this year, the NCAA reached an eight-year, $920 million deal with ESPN that gives the sports network exclusive rights to 40 championships, including women’s basketball. That translates to $65 million a year for the tournament, which looks like the best value in sports when you consider that CBS and Turner Sports are paying the NCAA $870 million a year to broadcast the men’s-basketball tournament.

Nobody was surprised to learn that the NCAA wasn’t exactly living up to its promises to boost the women’s game. But perhaps one of the more important conclusions from the review is that the NCAA was severely undervaluing the women’s-college-basketball tournament. Women are constantly blamed for the sport’s shortcomings, when in fact they’ve been undermined from the very beginning. Meanwhile, the National Women’s Soccer League signed a cross-platform media-rights deal in November worth $240 million, which is the largest media deal in women’s-sports history. That amount is 40 times higher than the previous deal.

Although it can be tricky comparing professionals to college athletes, the most-watched match the women’s-soccer league has ever played was the 2022 championship, which averaged 915,000 viewers. That same year, the UConn–South Carolina game attracted nearly 5 million viewers, the biggest rating for the title game in almost 20 years. And this was before the title game made its recent return to network television.

Some have speculated that the NCAA erred in not negotiating a separate television deal for women’s basketball.

“We need more networks to compete for our talents,” Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s head coach, said in November. “And I don’t know if that’s happening, but I hope that’s happening in the near future.”

Caitlin Clark has drastically moved the needle in women’s basketball, and there are so many encouraging signs that the game won’t lose steam with her departure to the WNBA. Women’s basketball is healthier than it’s ever been. South Carolina is losing its best player, Kamilla Cardoso, to the WNBA draft, but the bulk of the team returns next year to defend its national title and continue its dynasty. JuJu Watkins, USC’s blazing freshman guard, was the second-leading scorer in Division I women’s basketball, behind Clark. Watkins annihilated Clark’s freshman scoring record by 121 points and took the Trojans to the Elite Eight. And with USC moving to the Big Ten conference, Watkins is poised to become one of the game’s biggest stars, along with freshmen Hannah Hidalgo of Notre Dame and MiLaysia Fulwiley of South Carolina.

The remarkable growth of the college game has sparked a lot of speculation as to whether that growth will translate to the WNBA, whose season begins May 14. Already, there are signs that concerns the Clark effect won’t carry over are unfounded. Ticket sales for the Indiana Fever—Clark’s likely team—have experienced an astounding 136 percent increase. Also, 36 of the Fever’s 40 games will be televised nationally, giving fans an opportunity to immerse themselves in the star power the rest of the league offers.

The bottom line is that the women have done their part by providing plenty of captivating reasons for the game to thrive. It’s just a matter of whether the gatekeepers will let them down again.

A Bad Gamble

2024-03-27T13:05:00-04:00

This week, the pro baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani addressed the media for the first time since his name surfaced in an investigation of an alleged illegal gambling ring. He told reporters that the $4.5 million in wire transfers from his account had been sent without his knowledge by his friend and interpreter, and that he had “never bet on baseball or any other sports.”

Opening Day is this week, and Major League Baseball can’t be happy about this cloud over its biggest star. But with gambling so deeply embedded in mainstream sports culture, and most sports leagues now in partnership with gambling operations, these kinds of scandals have become far more common. The same day as Ohtani’s press conference, news broke that the NBA was investigating a player for possible betting irregularities.

Up until this point, the most controversial thing Ohtani had done was make a surprise announcement on Instagram that he had gotten married, which happened a few months after he signed a whopping $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now his close friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, is being investigated by MLB for his alleged involvement in a sports-betting ring operating out of California, where gambling on sports remains illegal.

Ohtani is Japanese, and the Dodgers hired Mizuhara to translate for him. Mizuhara’s ties to a bookmaking operation were first brought to light by ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Depending on your level of skepticism, you may suspect that Ohtani was victimized by a scammer with a gambling problem, or that he generously covered a friend’s massive gambling debt, or, perhaps, that Ohtani was the one using Mizuhara to place bets on his own behalf.

Mizuhara initially told ESPN that Ohtani had made several large payments to a California bookmaker to help cover Mizuhara’s debt. Mizuhara was adamant that he’d never placed any bets on baseball and that Ohtani had never gambled on sports, period.

But a day after Mizuhara’s lengthy interview, a different narrative took shape. Ohtani’s lawyers issued a statement saying that their client was the victim of a “massive theft” committed by Mizuhara. Mizuhara then retracted many of the details he had provided to ESPN, but would not comment on the allegation that he’d stolen money from his friend.

At the press conference on Monday, Ohtani insisted that he had never instructed Mizuhara to wire money from his account to cover the betting losses. “I’m very sad and shocked that someone who I’ve trusted has done this,” he said.

Ohtani didn’t take any questions, and so many remain. Before Mizuhara changed his story, he told ESPN that he and Ohtani had sat down together at his computer and sent “eight or nine” transactions of $500,000 from Ohtani’s account to the bookmaking operation. Would Ohtani really send that much money and never ask any questions about where it was going? If Mizuhara acted alone, how could Ohtani not have noticed such large sums missing? But the more important question is: Why did Mizuhara, who has since been fired from the Dodgers, suddenly change his story?

Perhaps it’s because wiring money to an illegal gambling operation is against the law. And while some people have speculated that the authorities are unlikely to have gone after Ohtani for the transfers alone, it makes sense that Ohtani’s camp might have wanted to redirect the blame. Ohtani wouldn’t be the first famous athlete to have been exploited by someone close to him. But the sudden shift in narrative creates some serious doubt.

What an awkward position for MLB to be in. Ohtani is a two-time American League MVP, a three-time All-Star, and an international megastar. In recent years, even the best pro baseball players have struggled to gain the mass popularity of other American sports superstars, such as the NFL’s Patrick Mahomes and the NBA’s LeBron James. Ohtani is both a dynamic hitter and a powerful pitcher, and with him on the roster, the Dodgers are a heavy favorite to win the World Series.

The last thing baseball wants or needs is for its most marketable star to be embroiled in a gambling scandal. Baseball has a messy history with gambling, from the 1919 Black Sox scandal—which many consider to be the most notorious game-fixing incident in sports history—to the lifetime banishment of the Cincinnati Reds legend Pete Rose. Rose was banned from baseball in 1989, after an MLB investigation uncovered that he’d placed bets on the Reds to win while he was playing for and managing the team.

Rose’s punishment, and the opprobrium he faced, once served as a deterrent for athletes tempted to wager on sports, but now even the stigma around gambling seems to have disappeared.

This is the downside of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to strike down the ban on sports wagering outside Nevada. Since then, sports betting has become legal in 38 states. Betting lines appear in graphics during game broadcasts. The prevailing thought used to be that Las Vegas could never be home to professional sports teams, because it was the gambling epicenter, but now the city has an NFL, a WNBA, and an NHL team, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has indicated that Vegas is on that league’s radar for expansion. Many former athletes promote wagering on betting apps. Sports-media organizations once didn’t openly discuss gambling as part of their coverage, but now ESPN has a show dedicated to gambling as well as its own wagering app. Meanwhile, other gambling apps, such as DraftKings and FanDuel, are producing sports content to further engage their customers.

Every major professional sports league prohibits players from gambling on their own sport, but most can gamble on other sports. NCAA players aren’t allowed to gamble on any sport the NCAA sponsors, but they can bet on things like cricket, horse racing, and MMA.

Such easy access to gambling means that more athletes and their associates will be tempted to partake. In 2022, the Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for a year for gambling on NFL games. Ridley said he had downloaded a gambling app and bet on NBA and NFL games, including those of his team at the time, the Atlanta Falcons. Last summer, several Iowa college football players, as well as a basketball player and a wrestler, were charged with underage gambling. The players, who were under 21, allegedly registered on sports-gambling apps using the names of friends and family members to place wagers on games. The University of Alabama fired its baseball coach last May for providing inside information to a gambler who bet against the school.

From this standpoint, it’s probably inaccurate to look at baseball’s investigation of Ohtani as some kind of tipping point. There have been quite a few tipping points since the Supreme Court’s decision to end the ban on sports gambling. Now it’s just a matter of how bad it can get.

What Caitlin Clark’s Fans Are Missing

2024-03-18T09:24:00-04:00

Earlier this month, Iowa star Caitlin Clark surpassed basketball legend Pete Maravich to become the all-time leading scorer in Division I basketball history—the first time a woman has held this distinction.

But amid the jubilation over this milestone have been disappointing reminders of just how much of women’s basketball history is forgotten—sometimes at the expense of the Black women who helped nurture and grow the sport when it was considered an afterthought.

NCAA records show that Clark unseated the University of Washington guard Kelsey Plum as the leading scorer for women. But that’s wrong: Another player named Lynette Woodard actually held that record.

Woodard scored those points back when women’s sports were governed by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which tracked individual player records. When the NCAA took over the organization, in the early ’80s, it counted only individual coaching accomplishments and school win-and-loss records. It didn’t preserve individual player statistics, which means that many athletes have not received the credit they deserved for shaping the game.

None of this is Clark’s fault. She announced this month that she is forgoing a fifth year of eligibility to enter the WNBA draft, and has been playing brilliantly. Clark has brought unprecedented attention to the women’s game, as evidenced by the record-setting crowd she helped draw to the Big Ten tournament in Minneapolis last week. In fact, Clark has been selling out arenas all season; many fans have lined up for hours to see her play.

Last year, the NCAA women’s basketball national championship game was the most-watched women’s basketball game ever, in large part because of the budding rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese of Louisiana State University, who defeated Iowa 102–85. With this being Clark’s final NCAA tournament, the expectation is that this year’s women’s tournament will be an even bigger ratings blockbuster, especially if the Hawkeyes make it to the Final Four.

[Jemele Hill: Angel Reese meets the same old stereotypes]

Unfortunately, it’s taken Clark’s massive popularity—and her breaking some hallowed all-time scoring records—to resurface not only Woodard’s historic accomplishment and her overall impeccable career but the achievements of so many other women who have been crucial to the sport’s success.

Woodard was an Olympic gold medalist who joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 1985, becoming the first woman to ever play for a men’s professional team. While she was in attendance for Clark’s notable performance against Ohio State, she told ESPN, “I don’t think Lynette Woodard would have this moment without Caitlin Clark.”

And not just Woodard. Pearl Moore actually scored more points while at a small college than Clark, Woodard, and Maravich when she played for Francis Marion College in Florence, South Carolina, from 1975 to 1979.

The NCAA has a long history of failing to properly support women’s sports. Just two years ago the NCAA was forced to publicly apologize after the former University of Oregon player Sedona Prince posted a video on social media showing how substandard the training facilities were for the women’s players competing in the tournament compared with the men’s. This same organization fought against the passage of Title IX—the landmark legislation passed in 1972 that prohibited discrimination in federally funded higher-education institutions based on gender and mandated fair opportunities for female athletes. In 1976, the NCAA tried unsuccessfully to sue its way out of complying with Title IX. The NCAA eventually complied with the law by essentially executing a hostile takeover of the AIAW.

Maybe some of that hostility remains, because the refusal to acknowledge the individual AIAW records doesn’t make any sense, and it does a disservice to not only Clark but the new fans she’s brought to the game who would be better served knowing the game’s complete history. For example, as remarkable as it is that Clark is averaging 32 points a game this season, during the AIAW days, Carol Blazejowski averaged 38.6 points a game in her final season at Montclair State College—the highest single-season scoring average for a woman. But according to the NCAA, that record doesn’t exist either.

Other prominent sports leagues have successfully integrated records from preexisting and competing leagues. In 2020, Major League Baseball announced that it was adding Negro League baseball statistics to its official records, recognizing about 3,400 Negro League baseball players as MLB players. The NFL also integrated statistics from its onetime rival, the American Football League, which the NFL merged with in 1970.

But Clark’s popularity and the NCAA’s shoddy behavior are much more than just entry points to discuss equitable record keeping. The attention Clark has drawn also opens a wider conversation about how many Black women, such as Woodard and Moore, have been marginalized in this sport despite their invaluable contributions.

Although both Moore and Woodard have been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame—perhaps the highest honor for a basketball player—the NCAA not recognizing their scoring records is an insult to their legacies. Sports media have also played a role in dismissing the magnitude of what these athletes have accomplished. The University of Massachusetts researchers E. Nicole Melton and Risa Isard released a study in 2021 that showed a deep discrepancy in media coverage between white and Black WNBA players. The research focused on 2020, when Black women accounted for 80 percent of the postseason WNBA awards, including the Most Valuable Player award. According to the report, Black WNBA players on average received 52 media mentions while their white counterparts received 118. A’ja Wilson, the 2020 WNBA MVP, for instance, received half the media coverage of the white player Sabrina Ionescu that season, though Ionescu played in only three games that year due to injury.

White players are aware of this disparity. When the University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers accepted her award for best female college athlete at the 2021 ESPYs, she expressed her gratitude for the Black women in basketball, because she knew their contributions tended not to be viewed with the respect they deserve.

“With the light that I have now as a white woman who leads a Black-led sport and celebrated here, I want to shed a light on Black women,” said Bueckers, who was the reigning Naismith national player of the year at the time. “They don’t get the media coverage that they deserve. They’ve given so much to the sport, the community, and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.”

While celebrating Clark’s accomplishments and decorated NCAA career, we should also remember the pioneers who helped carry her to this inflection point in the sport. The very least that legends such as Moore, Blazejowski, and Woodard deserve is having their accomplishments properly included in the history of the game.

Is Patrick Mahomes the Greatest Quarterback Ever?

2024-02-17T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 5:15 p.m. ET on February 17, 2024

This wasn’t supposed to be Patrick Mahomes’s year—that’s the scary part.

There were plenty of times this season when the Kansas City Chiefs and their star quarterback looked vulnerable, including a stretch when they lost four out of six games. Yet the end result was the same as it was last season: Mahomes won another Super Bowl, and notched another Super Bowl MVP, and now the rest of the football world is stuck with the gloomy reality that for the foreseeable future, any path to the Super Bowl means upending a generational player who is on course to be the greatest quarterback in NFL history.

If you’re wondering how a 28-year-old is being mentioned in a greatest-ever conversation, consider how this most recent Super Bowl win fits in with the rest of Mahomes’s career. In just seven NFL seasons, he has won three Super Bowls, three Super Bowl MVPs, and two league MVPs, and he’s a six-time Pro Bowl honoree.

On the surface, this speculation might seem disrespectful to Tom Brady, an NFL-record seven-time Super Bowl winner who retired last February. Brady is considered to be the greatest quarterback ever, having made 10 Super Bowl appearances, also an NFL record. He spearheaded the New England Patriots dynasty by winning six Super Bowls during his 20 seasons with the franchise, then won his final championship with Tampa Bay at 43 years old.

But Mahomes is a more elite talent than Brady was at this stage in his career. Brady and Mahomes each won their first Super Bowl when they were 24, and Brady won his third championship when he was 27. But Mahomes stands alone as the youngest player ever to win league MVP and Super Bowl MVP in the same season. Mahomes also already has more passing yards and touchdowns than Brady did in his 20s. Mahomes has two more MVPs and six more Pro Bowl honors than Brady had at the same period in his position.

“Yeah, I hear it,” Mahomes said of the Brady comparisons following the Chiefs’ win over the 49ers. “To me, it’s always going to be tough, because Brady beat me in the Super Bowl.”

Brady being 2–0 against Mahomes in the playoffs is often used as the counterargument to placing Mahomes in the same conversation as Brady, or the reason some believe Mahomes can never eclipse Brady.

[Jemele Hill: Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes had to disprove a misconception]

But even Brady understood early on that Mahomes was going to be the one competing against his legacy. In the 2019 AFC championship game, the Chiefs lost in overtime to Brady, who was then the quarterback for the New England Patriots. Mahomes was spectacular, passing for 295 yards and three touchdowns while helping his team erase a 14-point halftime deficit. Although Mahomes finished that game with a higher passer rating than Brady, the Patriots won because they were better when it mattered most. But that win didn’t prevent Brady from passing the torch to Mahomes.

“I was there when Tom Brady said I’m turning the keys over to you,” the Kansas City Chiefs head coach, Andy Reid, shared with reporters after last Sunday’s Super Bowl. “He did it right in our locker room. And so I think Tom is as proud as anybody.”

Brady beat Mahomes 31–9 in Super Bowl 55 as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but that doesn’t disqualify Mahomes from the greatest-ever conversation. Nor does it mean that Mahomes has to appear in or win more Super Bowls than Brady to top the quarterback list. Michael Jordan didn’t need to match or surpass Bill Russell’s 11 NBA championships to be the greatest pro basketball player ever. It seems unlikely that four-time NBA champion LeBron James will equal Jordan’s six NBA championships before his career ends, and yet plenty of people right now believe that James is better than Jordan. Serena Williams stands as the greatest female tennis player in history, even though she finished her career one shy of Margaret Court’s record 24 major singles titles.

Of course, accomplishments, championships, and titles matter in considering greatness. The championships just aren’t the only factor. Mahomes has the same rare ability as Brady and other sport greats when it comes to performing brilliantly under intense pressure during close games. And just like with Brady, Jordan, and Williams, the sense is that Mahomes is going to prevent a lot of other great players in his generation from winning championships.

When processing Mahomes’s legacy, it’s also important to note what his accomplishments mean for Black quarterbacks. For so long, Black players had to fight against widely held beliefs that they were incapable of mastering the quarterback position or being the face of a franchise. Warren Moon is the only Black quarterback in the NFL Pro Football Hall of Fame, but in order to play quarterback, he had to first spend six seasons playing in the Canadian Football League. Despite winning a Rose Bowl and putting up stellar numbers at the University of Washington, Moon was told by NFL scouts that he should switch positions. Because he refused, he wasn’t even invited to the NFL combine, an annual event where coaches and scouts thoroughly evaluate college players. Moon dominated the CFL, and eventually made it to the NFL at 28 years old. Those struggles helped pave the way for Mahomes, a certain Hall of Famer. Although Black quarterbacks are no longer an anomaly—a record 14 Black quarterbacks started for teams at the beginning of the 2023 season—Mahomes’s success has raised the ceiling for Black quarterbacks even higher.

Mahomes’s biggest hurdle to passing Brady is time. Brady played 23 seasons and left the game holding every significant quarterback record—passing yards, touchdowns, completions, attempts, and wins. If Mahomes is going to be considered better than Brady, he’s going to need to take some of those records from him, compete in and win a few more Super Bowls, and hope that he remains healthy until retirement.

All of that is doable. Becoming the greatest ever would be a foolish expectation for most players. But not this one.

This article originally said that Tom Brady won his third championship when he was 30; he was 27. This article also originally said that Brady beat Patrick Mahomes 31–9 in Super Bowl 50 as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; it was Super Bowl 55.

Have NFL Owners Started Trusting Black Coaches?

2024-01-27T08:00:00-05:00

The NFL made some significant coaching hires recently that might indicate that the league is headed in a more promising direction when it comes to employing Black head coaches.

Thursday, ESPN reported that the Atlanta Falcons will be hiring Raheem Morris to be their next head coach, making him the third Black coach to be elevated during this season. Previous hiring cycles haven’t been kind to Black coaches. In the five cycles before this season, 33 non-interim head-coaching jobs were available across the NFL. Just five of those positions went to Black coaches. In fact, upward mobility for Black coaches had been so abysmal that the former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a discrimination lawsuit against the NFL in 2022, and two other Black coaches joined.

But these three recent hires are noteworthy because they show that NFL owners are finally extending a level of trust that seems to have been reserved mostly for white coaches. Morris was the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 2009 to 2011, and rarely are Black coaches given a second opportunity to be a head coach. A day after the New England Patriots and legendary coach Bill Belichick parted ways, the team announced that it had hired Jerod Mayo, who at 37 is now the NFL’s youngest head coach and the first Black head coach in New England’s history. And then this week, the Las Vegas Raiders promoted Antonio Pierce from interim to head coach.

Now more than three Black head coaches will be on the sidelines come next NFL season, unlike the past five years. But beyond a slight increase in the number of Black head coaches, the bigger statement made with Mayo and Pierce is that they were both outside-the-box hires who received head-coaching opportunities despite lacking significant NFL coaching experience.

[Jemele Hill: The continuing humiliation of Black NFL coaches]

Historically, this has not been unusual—for white coaches. During the 2022 season, the Indianapolis Colts’ owner, Jim Irsay, hired Jeff Saturday, a former player, as an interim head coach. Saturday coached eight games for the Colts and won just once. Irsay considered making Saturday’s role permanent, but he changed directions. Even now, Saturday is believed to be the only head coach in the league’s history who was hired without college or NFL coaching experience.

In 2021, the Texans interviewed Josh McCown, the team’s former quarterback, for their head-coaching position. McCown also had never coached at any level. The Texans were rightfully criticized for considering McCown; the consideration was an insult, regardless of ethnicity. And although they instead hired David Culley, a Black coach they fired after one season, the Texans were so enamored of McCown that they reportedly urged other NFL teams to interview him so that their interest in him would have some validity.

Although there isn’t a narrow path to becoming an NFL head coach, there are some common steps. Most usually rise through the coaching ranks as former players, or coached athletes in college. Many current NFL head coaches were offensive or defensive coordinators, which is considered the last step before becoming a head coach. Over the past decade, teams have seemed to favor hiring coaches whose expertise is offense, which has created a ceiling for Black coaches, many of whom come from a defensive background. In 2022, 19 of the league’s 32 head coaches had an offensive background. Only one of those coaches was Black. Quarterback coach is another position that leads coaches to head-coaching jobs. Most of the quarterback coaches in the league are also white.

This is among the reasons Mayo and Pierce stand out. Both are Super Bowl champions and had excellent careers as linebackers. Mayo is a former first-round draft pick whom the Patriots selected tenth overall in 2008. He was a beloved Patriot who spent seven seasons with the team. Mayo was a business executive upon retirement but became a coach for the Patriots in 2019. Four years later, he’s a head coach. Pierce was in his first season as an NFL coach, although he also coached at Arizona State and Long Beach Polytechnic High School, which is considered one of the best high-school football programs in California for prospective NFL players.

“During his playing days, he was a student of the game who loved to watch film and was often described by his coaches and teammates as another coach on the field,” the New England Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, told reporters at Mayo’s introductory press conference. “Football is Jerod’s true passion. I believe coaching was always his destiny.”

[Jemele Hill: ‘Some team has to want me’]

Many Black NFL coaches have been bypassed, despite having credentials that should put them at the top of the list for any NFL coaching job. Sherman Lewis is probably one of the greatest examples in NFL history. He coached for 34 years, including 13 seasons as an NFL offensive coordinator. He was never hired as a head coach. Currently, the biggest head-scratcher in the NFL is: Why doesn’t the Washington Commanders offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy have a head-coaching job yet? Bieniemy reportedly has interviewed for 17 different head-coaching positions since 2019, including an interview last week with the Commanders. Bieniemy left his position as the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator to take on the same role with the Commanders this season. Most analysts thought Bieniemy would be a head coach by now because in Kansas City, he coached the three-time league MVP Patrick Mahomes for five seasons.

But Bieniemy’s success in Kansas City seemed to work against him. Andy Reid, the Chiefs’ head coach, was often given the credit for the team’s explosive offense. But the connection to Reid didn’t seem to hurt Doug Pederson, who was Reid’s offensive coordinator when Reid was the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. Pederson is now on his second NFL head-coaching job, with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Maybe the hiring of Morris, Mayo and Pierce shows that NFL owners are finally ready to stop judging Black coaches so narrowly. Real progress is made when Black coaches don’t need to have perfect résumés to be hired. They just have to be the best men for the job.

Aaron Rodgers Is Lighting His Football Legacy on Fire

2024-01-14T14:20:44-05:00

One of Aaron Rodgers’s biggest strengths as a Hall of Fame–caliber player is his awareness. At his best, the New York Jets quarterback can anticipate the movements of aggressive defenders and use his legs to create breathtaking plays down the field.

If only Rodgers possessed such sharp awareness away from the football field, where he seems to have a knack for creating unnecessary drama and exposing himself as a fake intellectual who can’t seem to stop showcasing his rampant narcissism. He isn’t in danger of jeopardizing his inevitable entrance into the Hall of Fame, but the more he digs into these conspiracies and attempts to moonlight as an infectious-disease expert, the more his moves will overshadow his brilliant career.

Rodgers’s latest controversy began earlier this month during his weekly paid appearance on ESPN’s daily sports program The Pat McAfee Show. During the show, the Super Bowl champion insinuated that the late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was linked to the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of operating an elaborate sex-trafficking ring involving underage girls who catered to high-profile clientele. Recently, a set of court documents was unsealed and released to the public as part of a lawsuit against Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking girls for Epstein. He died by suicide in 2019. The unsealed records include various deposition transcripts and exhibits from the Maxwell suit, in which lots of famous (and not so famous) names appear.

Rodgers’s fascination with the Epstein documents has resurfaced again, only this time he took things further by personalizing. “There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that doesn’t come out,” Rogers said on McAfee’s show, the day after a portion of the Epstein documents was released. “If that list comes out, I definitely will be popping some sort of bottle.”

Kimmel first responded with a tweet, threatening to sue Rodgers, who pretty much missed all of this football season after rupturing his Achilles tendon. And then last Monday, Kimmel excoriated Rodgers during a monologue on his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, in which he denied having any association with Epstein whatsoever.

“My guess is he won’t apologize; I hope I’m wrong,” Kimmel said on his show.

The conflict created a thorny situation for ESPN and McAfee, who brought his popular show to the network last May in a massive deal that reportedly is worth $85 million. M cAfee kind of apologized on Rodgers’s behalf while on air, explaining that his famous guest was “just trying to talk shit.”

However, Rodgers’s irresponsible rhetoric came at a significant cost. It pitted him—and, by extension, McAfee—against Kimmel, one of ABC’s biggest stars. Both ESPN and ABC are owned by the Walt Disney Company, making this conflict much more complex. McAfee announced on Wednesday that Rodgers would not be appearing on his show during the NFL playoffs—even though Rodgers was a regular guest during the playoffs last season. But a day after that announcement, Rodgers made a surprise appearance on the show to comment on the legendary coach Bill Belichick leaving the New England Patriots after 24 seasons and six Super Bowl titles. McAfee said his statement that Rodgers was done for the season didn't mean he was done permanently.

Kimmel was wrong about Rodgers being decent enough to apologize. When Rodgers appeared on McAfee’s show the week after his comments, he not only didn’t apologize; he gave a rambling explanation.

“I’m glad that Jimmy is not on the list,” Rodgers said. “I really am. And I don’t think he’s the P-word [pedophile], and, you know, I think it’s impressive that a man who went to Arizona State and has 10 joke writers can read off a prompter … I wish him the best. Again, I don’t give a shit what he says about me. But as long as he understands what I actually said and that I’m not accusing him of being on the list, then I’m all for moving forward.”

Despite having said some stupid things, Rodgers is not a stupid man. He knew exactly what he was doing by mentioning Kimmel’s name alongside Epstein’s. Rodgers was being petty because Kimmel often clowned Rodgers on his show for his staunch anti-vaccination opinions and his affinity for ludicrous conspiracy theories.

In 2021, Rodgers, who was then the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, was heavily criticized for lying to the media about his vaccination status, which didn’t come to light until Rodgers tested positive for the coronavirus. Months before testing positive, the four-time NFL MVP was asked point-blank by a reporter if he’d been vaccinated. “Yeah, I’ve been immunized,” he responded. Later, Kimmel mocked Rodgers for misleading the public, referring to him as a “Karen.” The host also joked: “In just a few months, [Rodgers] went from hosting Jeopardy to hitchhiker trying to steal your kidney.”

[Jemele Hill: Why Aaron Rodgers felt free to mislead people]

Rodgers has an obvious talent for playing word games to avoid accountability. As I previously wrote, Rodgers misleading the public about his vaccination status was a by-product of his entitlement, selfishness, and cowardice. He didn’t have the guts to stand behind his decision to not be vaccinated and, worse, he put other people’s health in jeopardy by violating the league’s coronavirus guidelines. Days before Rodgers tested positive for the virus, he attended a team-sanctioned Halloween party maskless. There were countless times that Rodgers didn’t follow the league’s protocols during his press conferences at the Packers’ facility, where he was supposed to wear a mask at all times. Eventually, the NFL fined the Packers $300,000 and Rodgers himself $14,650 for violating the COVID-19 protocols.

In recent years, Rodgers’s opinions have become problematic, as if he’s secretly auditioning to be the next right-wing media star. He uses some of the same familiar conservative catchphrases, such as woke mob. Rodgers has spent the past few years criticizing Anthony Fauci, the former longtime infectious-disease expert who was instrumental in leading the country’s response to COVID-19. “If science is Dr. Fauci, you’re damn right I’m defying science,” Rodgers said on McAfee’s show last October. Rodgers has even theorized on the show that a series of UFO sightings surfaced in order to distract the public from other news events. To make matters worse, he seems to consider any pushback on his opinions as an example of people trying to cancel him.

If he were really being silenced, the public wouldn’t know so much about some of his questionable opinions, and he certainly wouldn’t have a weekly guest spot on a national platform.

If Rodgers doesn’t want to get the vaccine, fine. If Rodgers wants to be critical of experts who dedicated their lives to the study of infectious diseases, that’s also fine, because not even experts are above criticisms and questioning. But it’s hypocritical for Rodgers to demand that people respect his choices and opinions when he has taken part in ridiculing players whose vaccine decisions didn’t align with his own. On McAfee’s show, Rodgers challenged the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce to a debate about the vaccines and called him “Mr. Pfizer” because Kelce partnered with the pharmaceutical company to encourage the public to get the COVID-19 vaccination and a flu shot.

Rodgers is a generational talent. He turned 40 last month, so it’s likely he won’t be playing that much longer. His opinions are becoming dangerously close to making some people embarrassed they ever supported him. Unfortunately in the meantime, he’s become someone who is increasingly hard to root for because of his lack of awareness.

College Football’s Super PACs Produced This Championship Game

2024-01-07T06:00:00-05:00

Fan support is a big reason the University of Washington Huskies and the University of Michigan Wolverines will play in college football’s championship game tomorrow night in Houston. That support isn’t just emotional; it’s also financial.

For decades, college athletes received only scholarships as compensation, until legal changes forced the NCAA to let them profit from their own name, image, and likeness. The new NIL era allows individual athletes to accept endorsement deals. But at colleges and universities all around the country, something else has happened: Fan-supported “collectives” have sprouted up to help teams stay competitive by providing broad categories of players with thousands of dollars in cash apiece—ostensibly for their marketing value rather than for their performance on the field.

Looking at how this season’s four-team college-football playoff unfolded, Huskies and Wolverines fans would probably agree that their money was well spent. Michigan, for example, was initially slower than other big-name athletic programs to embrace collectives. Now the university has multiple collectives at its disposal, including the Champions Circle, an official partner of the school’s athletic department. In 2022, Champions Circle raised $7.5 million for the football team. If not for Valiant Management Group, which was founded by the former Wolverines fullback Jared Wangler and bills itself as “the leading sports-marketing agency representing University of Michigan student-athletes,” some of Michigan’s key players might not have returned this year to compete for a national championship. After the Wolverines lost to Texas Christian University in last year’s Fiesta Bowl, Valiant launched the One More Year Fund to entice Michigan players with NFL prospects to remain with the team.

[Jacob Stern: America’s most dystopian halftime show]

Funds like these are the college-sports equivalent of super PACs. Other top programs have had similar assistance. A collective called Montlake Futures helped Washington retain its core players, including the quarterback and Heisman Trophy runner-up Michael Penix Jr. The University of Texas, the team that Washington beat in the Sugar Bowl to advance to the championship game, has the Texas One Fund, which has paid $14 million to Texas football players since 2021.

The money that fans are pouring into their teams is reshaping the college-football landscape, but it also means they’re carrying a financial burden that shouldn’t necessarily be theirs. Also, none of these fan collectives addresses the real issue: Players are still being shut out of the larger financial empire that they’ve built with their own hard work. Ever-larger broadcast deals have turned college football into a multibillion-dollar sport, but players are not sharing in that revenue.

Although it’s admirable that a Texas nonprofit created a fund that would pay every Texas offensive lineman $50,000 a year with a goal of helping the Longhorns address a team weakness, the university’s athletic department reported a staggering $239 million in revenue in 2022 , mostly from media rights, ticket sales, and direct contributions. ESPN’s current television deal with the College Football Playoff pays an average of $470 million annually, which enriches tournament organizers, participating schools, and the stadiums where games are held.

Next year, the playoff will expand from four to 12 teams, which could attract, by one estimate, $2.2 billion in media-rights fees from multiple television partners. Top schools stand to gain a lot more revenue. But longer playoffs mean that top college athletes take on more risk of injuries that could jeopardize their professional career. That players can accept financial support from fans is an improvement over what used to happen, but the real power brokers are still escaping what should be primarily their obligation.

The sham of amateurism was debunked a long time ago, but the college-football decision makers continue to insist on maintaining the ruse because, ultimately, they don’t want to share the wealth.

[Matt Connolly: Enjoy your awful basketball team, Virginia ]

The NCAA is clearly hoping the day never comes when schools have to directly pay the players a piece of the massive television money they earn, but that day looks more and more inevitable. A class-action lawsuit, House v. NCAA, could completely dismantle the unfair system that the college-sports governing body has constructed. Lawyers for the University of Arizona swimmer Grant House and other plaintiffs argue that college athletes should be paid for what they would have earned before the NIL rules changed in 2021.

If the plaintiffs win, there would cease to be any limits on NIL payments to athletes, and the NCAA would be forced to create a revenue-sharing system with the players. The plaintiffs are seeking more than $1.4 billion in damages—$1.3 billion for male athletes and $50 million for female athletes. (Football and men’s basketball generate the largest share of revenue in college sports.) The trial is set to begin next January.

If the NCAA loses, it will be a fate that the organization has definitely earned. Even if that happens, these collectives probably won’t go away; as the expense of college sports continues to grow, schools will need every resource possible to recruit and retain players. But fans alone can’t solve the basic inequity facing student athletes. The NCAA and its member schools need to start paying their fair share.

Why Is the NBA Letting Josh Giddey Play?

2023-12-16T06:00:00-05:00

The NBA has shown in the recent past that it is willing to discipline players just for tarnishing its brand. So the league’s remarkably passive stance on Josh Giddey, a 21-year-old Oklahoma City Thunder guard, seems strangely out of place.

Giddey is still playing. But he is under separate investigations by the league and by police in Newport Beach, California, amid suspicion that he had intimate contact with an underage girl in 2021.

“I can’t think of many circumstances where we’ve suspended a player based on an allegation alone,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last week on ESPN’s daily show NBA Today. “In this case, we have an allegation, a police investigation, and a parallel NBA investigation. Where there is a criminal investigation, we take a back seat.” The immediate effect of this approach has been that Giddey, who has not been criminally charged and has declined to comment on the issue, gets to keep playing while his case is adjudicated.

[Austin Murphy: The fall of ]Sports Illustrated

That unsettles a number of fans; in recent weeks, as the Thunder visited Minnesota, Houston, and Dallas, Giddey was greeted with boos. The league’s cautious approach has also raised doubts about the fundamental fairness of the way the NBA disciplines its athletes. Giddey is white, whereas a number of players who have faced much swifter punishment for alleged offenses outside the sport are Black.

One such player is Kevin Porter Jr., formerly a guard with the Houston Rockets. He was arrested in September and charged with assaulting his girlfriend, the former WNBA player Kysre Gondrezick, at a New York City hotel. The Rockets banned Porter from all team activities before trading him to Oklahoma City in October. The Thunder waived Porter immediately. Gondrezick has since denied that he assaulted her. Prosecutors have dropped one of the charges against Porter, but he still faces two others. He has pleaded not guilty.

The accusations against Giddey first surfaced in late November, in an anonymous social-media post that included videos and photos of a man who appeared to be Giddey alongside a girl who was said to be under 18—the age of consent in California. Citing an anonymous source, the Los Angeles Times later reported that the teen is a high-school student in Orange County. Some news accounts indicate that she is refusing to cooperate with the police.

Waiting for a completed police investigation before responding seems, on its face, like a sensible and fair approach for a league to take. In practice, the NBA’s response to player misconduct is far more subjective. The league and its teams routinely make disciplinary decisions without waiting for the criminal-justice system. The Memphis Grizzlies superstar Ja Morant is scheduled to return to NBA action next week, after an unpaid 25-game suspension for displaying firearms irresponsibly multiple times on social media. Earlier this year, the league suspended him for eight games for a similar offense. Morant has never been charged or seriously investigated by the criminal-justice system for such behavior.

The punishment was appropriate: On one livestream, Morant waved a gun while riding in a car with a friend. On another, Morant brandished a gun while appearing intoxicated in a nightclub. When one of the NBA’s biggest stars is flaunting firearms, it reflects badly on the entire league.

The NBA has every right to defend its image. The Brooklyn Nets suspended the guard Kyrie Irving after he posted a link to a film that featured anti-Semitic tropes and minimized the Holocaust. Both the Morant and Irving situations required a swift and decisive response.

[Amanda Mull: Sports betting won]

Fair or not, the league’s history of punishing certain offenses quickly makes the lack of action against Giddey seem more suspicious. Some commentators believe that Giddey is benefiting from a double standard. “It kind of pisses me off because of the Kevin Porter Jr. situation,” the former NBA athlete Rashad McCants said recently on No Chill, a podcast hosted by Gilbert Arenas, another former pro basketball player. McCants went on to say that Porter’s “career could be over because of an ‘alleged,’ right? Josh Giddey got to play. Josh Giddey ain’t being pushed all over the internet like this is a problem, like the Kevin Porter Jr. shit was.”

After Porter’s arrest, the Rockets and the Thunder immediately distanced themselves from him—as they should have. But Oklahoma City has chosen to keep playing Giddey while he’s under dual investigations. “No change in status from a basketball standpoint,” the Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault said last month when asked about the guard.

Giddey, McCants maintained, plays for an organization that protects him. By contrast, Porter was treated more harshly because he had a more contentious relationship with the teams he played for.

The Thunder had the option of keeping Giddey on the bench or away from the team while his case is sorted out. That might seem harsh, given that the allegations against the Thunder star are still unproven. But the NBA isn’t a court of law. And as a matter of deterrence, the league must do what it can to show that it takes allegations of violence against women—and the sexual exploitation of women—seriously.

Optics matter, and right now the NBA is looking awfully inconsistent.

Don’t Cry for Jim Harbaugh

2023-11-17T12:25:00-05:00

Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on November 17, 2023

After Michigan’s impressive 24–15 win over Penn State last weekend, the offensive coordinator, Sherrone Moore, broke down in tears as he professed his loyalty to the head coach, Jim Harbaugh, who could not be present at the game. “I fucking love you, man,” he said in a live TV interview, choking back emotion. “I love the shit out of you, man. We did this for you.”

Moore laid it on so thick, you would have thought Harbaugh was absent because of a life-threatening illness. In fact, he was serving a suspension for letting a significant alleged cheating scandal unfold right under his nose—or worse. The NCAA is investigating claims that the former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions concocted a scheme to surveil and sometimes film opposing coaches’ signals, in violation of NCAA rules. Last week, while the NCAA investigation was ongoing, the Big Ten, Michigan’s athletic conference, imposed a punishment of its own, suspending Harbaugh for three games.

Yesterday, the school announced that Harbaugh would stop fighting the suspension. This was surprising, because the coach and the school had until then struck a defiant tone. Michigan responded to the Big Ten punishment by filing for a temporary restraining order. Harbaugh seemed eager to appear in court. “I’m just looking forward to that opportunity—due process,” Harbaugh told reporters. “I’m not looking for special treatment, not looking for a popularity contest, just looking for the merit of what the case is.”

But a popularity contest is precisely what Harbaugh and the Wolverines seem to have been trying to win since the cheating allegations emerged. They have worked hard to create the public perception that their program is being unfairly targeted, making it seem as if there is a grand conspiracy to derail the Wolverines’ undefeated season and their realistic bid for a national championship. It’s a response that seems pulled from the world of politics: Never admit fault. No accusation has merit. Everything is a witch hunt.

[Devin Gordon: America ruined college football. Now college football is ruining America.]

Of course, Harbaugh has the right to defend himself. He has denied having any knowledge that his staffer did anything unethical, and so far no evidence has suggested otherwise. The program suspended Stalions as soon as the allegations emerged. One of the major differences between professional and college football, however, is that in the college game, the coach has control over—and is ultimately culpable for—whatever happens inside the program.

And it’s hard to extend the benefit of the doubt indefinitely when this isn’t even Harbaugh’s first suspension of the season. Michigan imposed a different three-game penalty on Harbaugh at the beginning of the season, which was apparently the university’s way of getting ahead of a looming NCAA punishment that could be even worse. The NCAA has accused Harbaugh of impermissible recruiting during the COVID-19 dead period and, more significantly, of lying about it to investigators, a charge Harbaugh has denied.

None of these allegations has been proved, but in each case the wounds appear to be primarily self-inflicted. That hasn’t stopped Harbaugh and the Wolverines from behaving as if they’re being unjustly put in front of a firing squad. According to Sports Illustrated, Michigan’s Board of Regents discussed leaving the Big Ten if the conference punished Harbaugh without due process—as if the conference has any earthly reason not to want a powerhouse such as Michigan to be successful. Sure, there’s an argument that the Big Ten should have waited until the NCAA completed its sign-stealing investigation before suspending Harbaugh, but this isn’t a court of law. The Big Ten is within its rights to protect the integrity of its conference based on its reading of the evidence.

Harbaugh is far from the first coach to use an “us versus them” narrative to get the most from their players. But in light of the allegations, it’s embarrassing to see his team wearing Michigan vs. Everybody T-shirts and to hear Harbaugh theorize that America should be rooting for the Wolverines because “America loves a team that beats the odds and adversity and overcomes what the naysayers, critics, and so-called experts think.” Are those new code words for a coach breaking the rules, possibly misleading the NCAA, and having someone on his staff who decided to do a remix of the New England Patriots’ Spygate scandal? America may love an underdog, but, at least when it comes to sports, it doesn’t exactly embrace people who violate the spirit of competition. Ask Lance Armstrong or the Houston Astros. Although teams often cast themselves as the victim amid these kinds of controversies, that doesn’t make them look any less foolish.

[Jemele Hill: College football’s power brokers are destroying it]

I’m sure some Michigan fans will accuse me of bias, and bitterness, because my alma mater, Michigan State, is currently in the midst of a terrible season that included being blown out by Michigan, 49–0. In fact, I think our lousy on-field performance may have saved us from more serious failings. Our former coach Mel Tucker was fired early in the season for alleged sexual misconduct. (His attorneys have called the firing “unjustified,” and Tucker is appealing the university’s decision.) If the Spartans had been championship contenders this year, like Michigan, I don’t doubt that some fans and administrators would have rallied to Tucker’s defense.

Michigan and the Big Ten were scheduled to appear in court today to determine the fate of the requested restraining order. Instead, we got the surprise news that the legal challenge was dropped. Does this mean the Wolverines will cease trying to convince people they’re the real underdogs? We should find out soon. When Michigan takes the field against Maryland tomorrow, Harbaugh will once again be watching from afar, and his assistant, Moore, will once again be filling in. Let’s hope he spares us the waterworks this time. Because if the team continues to insist that it’s “us against the world,” it will discover that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This article originally misstated the score of the most recent game between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The University of Michigan won 49–0, not 29–7.