Tag: Column

The Mets are right: Booing your favorite team is pointless. We’re going to keep doing it anyway.

We boo because we care, and we want that to matter.

One of the weekend’s controversies emerged when New York Mets players gave their own fans thumbs-down gestures.

The reasoning, according to those players, is that Mets fans have been unduly harsh on the team. This is payback. “We’re not machines, we’re going to struggle. … It just feels bad when I strikeout and I get booed. … We’re going to do the same thing to let them know how it feels,” Javy Baez said.

So this brings us a good chance to examine the fan-athlete relationship as it stands now, and to ask deep philosophical questions like: What is owed, and to whom?

Just kidding. Mets fans should be booed. Have you ever met a Mets fan? Then you know.

It should be noted that I am from Philadelphia, and therefore grew up under the impression that both sports in general and the Mets in particular exist purely to provide me and every other Philadelphian a reason to boo. They are second on our list of favorite things to boo. Behind the Phillies.

Look, the reality is that while we have better access than ever before — to video, to technology, to numbers that help us understand sports — we’re as disconnected from the acts of elite athletes as we’ve ever been. Hitting a baseball is stupidly hard.

I worked in minor league baseball as a teenager, and by work I mean I mostly lounged around the stadium with my buddies. We took in approximately way too many hours of batting practice during the hot, hazy summers when the players who would eventually win the Phillies a World Series were pushing their way through the system.

Pat Burrell would rip these majestic, high-arcing bombs to left. Jimmy Rollins roped line drives to the gap, his wrists flicking with unimaginable quickness. The ball coming off Ryan Howard’s bat created a sound I’ll never forget.

Those knocks were just a fraction of their swings on any given day, though, and the players who followed them — many highly drafted — would pale in comparison. On pitches meat-balled over the heart of the plate at 67 miles per hour by the assistant coach who’d beg us for leftover hot dogs after the game.

So fans should probably never, ever boo a pro athlete. You can’t come close to doing what they do, no matter how many times you’ve pretended to on your driveway or PS5.

Booing is, for fans who mean well, pragmatic (I’m sure there are some miserable people who just do it to feel better about anything). If you’ve put your time, money and energy into a team, you want to have some agency in how it performs. Only, there is none, really. At all.

So booing (and its cousin Telling An Athlete How Exactly To Do Their Sport Even Though You Have Nacho Cheese On Your Shirt And Are Four $18 Beers Deep) is a sort of stand-in. Perhaps, you believe, you can coax or shame your team into being better. If not, it’s nice to give the anger somewhere to go.

Most fans who take any time to be reflective about booing their own team couch it like this: Mistakes and failure can be tolerated, but lack of effort won’t be. Since only one team in any given sport is going to win it all, we want to take solace in the idea that at least our guys gave it their all.

This is the intersection where Mets fans and the actual Mets collided: The team now sits 7.5 games behind in the NL East, which it led for much of the season. This drop off MUST be due to a failure of will. It MUST be corrected, or at least noted, via booing.

I know nothing, at all, about why the Mets appear to be faltering now. It’s probably some combination of bad luck, good play by other teams and mistakes or struggles piling up now whereas they were more scarce earlier. The statistical revolution has taught us that you need to take a long view to know what a team or player really is, yet when you’re living in the middle of a Small Sample Size trend none of that really resonates.

It’s easy to say Mets players should be immune to it all. They’re well-paid professionals who’ve been through it plenty and should know the deal. But isn’t it nice to know they’re human? And isn’t it productive for them to point out that somebody cursing their mother after striking out on a curve ball is not, in fact, the key to them learning how to hit a curveball?

Baez also said this: “I play for the fans and I love the fans but if they’re gonna do that, they’re putting more pressure on the team.” The first part of this quote doesn’t mean much: Athletes don’t have any choice but to play for fans. Without them all of this would go away.

The second part is probably a misstep, but also true, since most every human performs better when they feel supported. But you’re not supposed to say this out loud, really — fans want to believe the players care every bit as much as they do. That the pressure is already there. This is complicated, though: Ted over there in the third row has loved the Mets with all he’s got since he saw his dad and grandpa embrace after the ball scooted through Bill Buckner back in 1986. How is Javy Baez going to muster up the emotion to match that? Of course he cares. Of course he wants to win. But, also, this is his job. He’s a cog in a business.

We know that part of it better than ever, too. We study salaries and debate how teams should spend money and scour lists of free agents. And yet. In the stands, as the game unfolds, we want the illusion to never shimmer or flicker: We want to believe that it’s actually simple, that it’s not about luck or chance or curves flatting out over time, and that if we voice the disappointment we feel from someone else’s human failing they will be given whatever it is they lacked, because we had it all along.

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Opinion: Annika Sorenstam, Gary Player shame golf by accepting Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump

Columnist Christine Brennan on how Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player accepting the Medal of Freedom from President Trump shames golf.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to never accept defeat, then watched as hundreds of them stormed the U.S. Capitol and rampaged through the halls of Congress, later saying, “We love you, you’re very special” to those involved in the deadly and appalling attack.

On Thursday, Hall of Fame golfers Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player stood with Trump at the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They likely were the first outsiders to be with Trump at the White House since the reprehensible violence just 16 blocks away.

Sorenstam and Player, widely regarded as paragons of sportsmanship and honor in their game, did not cancel on Trump. They did not note the horror that had taken place on his watch and decide that Thursday wasn’t an appropriate time to celebrate with him at the White House. They did not care about the gravity of the situation, about the calls from political leaders to remove Trump by impeachment or the 25th Amendment.

No. They willingly chose to accept an award from Trump and be seen with him a day after his words and actions launched one of the most shameful incidents in U.S. history.

There will be those who say Sorenstam, who was born in Sweden, and Player, from South Africa, can choose to accept an award from Trump whenever they wish. That is true. What’s more, Sorenstam was an ardent supporter of Trump’s failed re-election bid, retweeting Jack Nicklaus’ multi-paragraph endorsement of Trump in the days before the 2020 election.

But Sorenstam and Player don’t just represent themselves. They represent all of golf, a mostly lily-white sport that has struggled for decades, to its continuing detriment, to attract women and people of color – just as Trump, a creature of the game, has denigrated those very same people.

SON KNOWS BEST: Gary Player’s son thinks father should decline Presidential Medal of Freedom

As representatives of their game, and as business people who benefit greatly from it, their reputations are sullied, forever. Sorenstam and Player now will be attached to Trump at this horrible time in our nation’s history, forever. They will be known as the people who had the chance to gracefully suggest another day might be better to celebrate golfers in this nation – golfers, for heaven’s sake – and they refused to do so.

They had nothing to do with the insurrection of the Trump mob on Wednesday, of course, but they happily became Trump’s Thursday accessories. They celebrated with him as our nation mourns what he has wrought.

A third golfer, the late Babe Didrikson Zaharias, also was honored by Trump. This is just a guess, but it’s hard to believe the strong, legendary, groundbreaking Babe would have allowed herself to have anything to do with that awful man.

While Player, 85, who once supported his nation’s racist policy of apartheid before later denouncing it, is an understandable Trump ally, Sorenstam’s involvement with Trump is perplexing. She is one of the greatest women to ever play the game. Now 50, Sorenstam is known as a trailblazer for playing in a men’s PGA Tour event, the Colonial, in 2003, enduring sexist taunts from a couple of male players while drawing huge crowds and acquitting herself quite well before missing the cut.

When she retweeted Nicklaus’ endorsement of Trump, I texted her a question:

“How do you reconcile Trump’s awful record on women – bragging and joking about sexually assaulting women (“Access Hollywood” tape), calling the Democratic VP nominee a ‘monster,’ being accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment by at least 26 women, etc. – while being a woman who has forged an amazing career around the issues of inclusion for women and treating women equally and fairly and with respect?”

She never replied. On Thursday afternoon, I texted again, this time to say I’d like to talk to her about accepting the Medal of Freedom a day after the awful rampage of Trump supporters at the Capitol. She did not reply.

It turns out that the ceremony for Sorenstam and Player was not open to the press. There were no photos immediately available. The event was basically held in secret.

Actually, it was held in shame.

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Booger McFarland’s take on Dwayne Haskins is as harmful as it is nonsensical

Just an absolutely putrid take.

Too often when we watch sports, we like to pretend we are watching some sort of real-life drama play out in an intimate, instructional way. It’s not just that we’re watching the most elite athletes fiercely competing with each other in contests that often ultimately come down to luck. There’s got to be more to it than that!

And of course there is. These athletes and coaches are just regular people, as flawed and unknowable as any of us. We should be interested in them and what they believe in and care about.

What we should avoid doing, always, is taking a situation we’re not actually close to and extrapolating it out into some sort of broad referendum on a group of worker-athletes who, despite their popularity, are so often burdened with negative stereotypes.

Yet here’s ESPN’s Booger McFarland, saying some of the dumbest stuff you’ll hear to a gigantic television audience:

“Often times young players, especially — I’m gonna go ahead — especially young African-American players, because they make up 70 percent of this league — they come into this league and ask themselves the wrong thing. They come into the league saying not ‘How can I be a better player?’ They don’t say ‘how can I be a better teammate?’ They don’t say ‘how can I be a better person; how can get my organization over the hump?’

“Here’s what they come in saying. They come in saying ‘How can I build my brand better? How can I build my social media following better? How can I work out on Instagram and show everybody that I’m ready to go, but when I get to the game, I don’t perform?”

“Dwayne Haskins unfortunately is not the first case that I’ve seen like this. And it won’t be the last. And it bothers me because a lot of it is the young African-American player. They come in and they don’t take this as a business. It is still a game to them. …

“I saw a quarterback do it. I saw JaMarcus Russell do it. The No. 1 pick in the draft, they gave him $40 million, and he threw it down the damn drain because he didn’t take it seriously.”

McFarland has already doubled down on this nonsense, in case you were wondering.

Where to even begin?

Dwayne Haskins, the 15th pick in the 2019 NFL draft who was recently cut by the Washington Football Team, isn’t even close to being the prime example of a top prospect supposedly partying his career away. That’d be Johnny Manziel, who is white.

There’s nothing suggesting he lost his career by trying to build his brand; he was tagged in some photos showing him partying in an a way that is inadvisable during a pandemic. Young, wealthy, famous athletes have partied for as long as they have existed — extending all the way back to the decades upon decades when the top pro leagues wouldn’t even allow Black athletes to participate. The Cowboys dynasty of the 1990s was renowned for partying.

There’s no evidence, whatsoever, that a large portion of the league’s Black majority fails in any substantial way to focus on football, as McFarland claims. Quite the contrary. Each year a few hundred Black players enter the league and become key contributors. Some grow into veterans. Others don’t, for a variety of reasons but the primary one being that the NFL is a physical grind unlike anything else and churns through bodies.

If athletes are supposed to treat the NFL as a business, like Booger says, what’s wrong with building their brand? That’s smart business! That’s focusing on creating something potentially lasting for the future. Most of them are going to get only a few seasons, and it’s not like the team they play for or the league itself is going to go to great lengths to help them out after their usefulness on the field has expired. They should build a brand, and building a brand shouldn’t be interpreted as not also caring about football (it’s quite possible to do both.)

The JaMarcus Russell comparison comes out of nowhere, seemingly related simply because Russell was also a Black person drafted high in the draft to play QB who ultimately did not work out. Social media was in its infancy when Russell was playing — he joined Twitter in 2010, his last year in the NFL — so that wasn’t a factor. We’ll never know the full extent of what went wrong with Russell, but he’s said the pressure of being the No. 1 pick got to him and was arrested for possession of codeine after being cut. Mental health and drug dependency probably had as much to do with him faltering as failing to “take it seriously” did.

I know absolutely nothing about Dwayne Haskins as a person and know even less about the inner workings of the Redskins and how culpable Haskins is for the end of his career in Washington. By his own admission he failed in certain ways, and we should absolutely continue to report on what happened and try to learn from it.

But pretending this is an indictment of Black players across the league is pandering gibberish. It’s the sort of thing football people love to say to each other, thinking they sound hardened and wise. Instead they sound like men who were indoctrinated into a bankrupt culture without even realizing it.

Let’s talk about the situations Haskins was put into in his young football career. He was recruited by Urban Meyer, who eventually left Ohio State amid a scandal caused when he failed to properly handle domestic abuse allegations against an assistant coach. After he left Florida years earlier, reports surfaced about Meyer coddling star players. This is not the sort of mentorship that “makes boys into men” or whatever the Football Establishment would have you believe.

Haskins was then drafted by Washington, the NFL’s most despicable franchise.

Yes, it’s fair to point out the ways in which Haskins bungled his chance, but not without this background as context. Many people and institutions failed him along the way.

It is completely unfair — and only bolsters damaging, racist stereotypes — to pretend Haskins is a symptom of a larger issue.

Opinion: People are pouring out in the streets, cheering Biden, Harris and democracy

Celebrations break out as Biden wins presidency

It took the nation several tense days to get here, but late Saturday morning AP, CNN and then all other broadcast outlets, finally called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

I don’t really need to tell you that the last four years have been total chaos, as President Trump and his divisive rhetoric and politics have exposed deep divisions that exist in our country. As the vote counts continue to roll in, several things are becoming clear. First, more people than ever voted in this historical election. Totals continue to rise, but as of now almost 75 million people have cast ballots for Biden, while 70 million people voted for the sitting President. Second, Biden has gotten more votes than any another presidential candidate, including Barack Obama in 2008. While that margin is close, Biden is entering the White House with a clear mandate. Still, as vote totals indicate, we’re a deeply divided country, and that will not go away anytime soon.

Even with that in mind, as news started to spread that the victory had been called for Biden/Harris, people in major cities took to the streets to celebrate. Videos on social media show people dancing in the streets in Philadelphia, people cheering in New York, shouts erupting from high rises in Chicago.

If there’s one thing to be learned from this, it’s what one Twitter used pointed out.

“Live your life in such a way that the entire planet doesn’t dance in the street when you lose your job.”


Way to get out and vote, America!

Is the ACC’s 346-team NCAA Tournament idea feasible?

We don’t yet know how the season will be altered so it can be played in a post-COVID world but it’s a safe bet that it will be significant.

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College basketball is in a bit of disarray.

After canceling the NCAA Tournament last season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020-21 season is also in jeopardy. Several leagues, including the Pac-12, have postponed all athletic competition until Jan. 1, meaning that it’s currently up in the air whether non-conference games will be able to happen.

If the entirety of Division I chose to move to conference-only basketball schedules, it would have a trickle-down effect within the entire sport. When you remove opportunities for mid-major teams to score upsets against higher-quality opponents, how can the NCAA Tournament Committee possibly evaluate non-power conference teams?

The 15 men’s basketball coaches in the ACC think they have their solution: an all-inclusive, 346-team tournament.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Every Division I program eligible for the NCAA Tournament this year would qualify, with the opening rounds replacing conference tournaments. Early seeding would be geography-based, and after the first week of play, the tournament would resemble its usual field of 64-68 teams.

This idea certainly has its positives. For one, it makes up for the fact that the tournament was canceled last year by allowing every team an opportunity to play in the tournament. Additionally, it would incentivize players not to opt-out, as they would be guaranteed an NCAA Tournament appearance.

Perhaps the most convincing argument for the NCAA will be money, though. Canceling the tournament last year hurt the coffers big-time, and focusing what will certainly be a mess of a season around what is already by far the most profitable component of college basketball would be an understandable move.

But logistically, this idea is a disaster.

First of all, it requires an improvement in the state of the pandemic within the United States.

Though the NBA seems to be managing its bubble with success, the NBA bubble only had 22 teams at its peak. Increasing that number by almost 16 times would require an unprecedented level of organization and preparation.

The number of people that would need to be tested and quarantined would be in the thousands, and all that effort would result in half of those people being sent home after one game of basketball.

Additionally, while the NCAA would likely see a revenue increase as a result of the expanded tournament, it almost certainly wouldn’t offset the drastic increase in expenses that would be required to make such a setup work.

Not to mention that setting up a 346-team bracket would be an exhausting and confusing ordeal, and the fact remains that the vast majority of teams in the tournament would have virtually no shot at winning a title.

Though college hoops fans are likely salivating at the idea of an expanded tournament, the logistical hurdles simply seem too large to overcome.

So, what alternatives remain? CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander presents an interesting hypothetical.

What if instead of ending the year with a massive tournament, the NCAA decided to bookend the season with tournaments? The NCAA Tournament would remain in its usual format, but the season would begin with 11 nonconference, 32-team tournaments in late November and December.

Making these tournaments double-elimination would provide each team with roughly a third of the nonconference games of a usual season, and it would help ease the burden of the tournament committee when deciding which mid-major teams are worthy of making the big dance.

Norlander’s solution may not be feasible, either, but it seems to be a more workable path than what the ACC is currently suggesting.

No matter what, though, this college basketball season will certainly be extraordinarily atypical. And while we don’t yet know how the season will be altered so it can be played (if it can be played) in a post-COVID world, it seems like a safe bet that it will be significantly altered to some degree.

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How the college football season could have been salvaged

For all the reasons why COVID-19 makes a season an unlikely possibility, college football players could still have suited up this fall.

Over the last five months, I’ve written extensively for Gators Wire about all the challenges facing a college football season. I’ve discussed why I didn’t think, given the material circumstances and statements made by stakeholders with actual power to make these decisions as opposed to a lowly sports blogger like myself, a season would be feasible.

The primary reason I believed this to be true was that, over that period of time, nothing fundamentally changed about the reality of the situation. Not the state of the pandemic in the United States, nor the lack of interest from institutions and conferences in proactively addressing safety concerns.

But to conflate what has been painfully obvious for months with what was inevitable is, in this case, foolish. Because for all the reasons why COVID-19 makes a season an unlikely possibility, college football players could still have suited up this fall.

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Even accounting for the disastrous way in which the U.S. government has handled the pandemic response, the NCAA could have dodged this bullet long before the first discovered case of COVID-19.

Five years before, in fact.

In 2014, the NCAA lost a class action suit against former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and other former student-athletes, who alleged that the association’s use of their image and likeness in NCAA video games was illegal. The NCAA had to pay out $42.2 million, and the ruling ended the successful NCAA Football video game series.

But the NCAA balked on the amateurism issue. Instead of using the court’s decision that such action violated anti-trust law as a catalyst to modernize the system and end the unsustainable model of amateurism, it paid its pittance without addressing any of the underlying issues that led to the problem in the first place.

Flash-forward to the present, and college football faces a serious dilemma. Experiments undertaken by professional leagues have demonstrated that some degree of a bubble is necessary for the operation of sports in a post-COVID world.

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But, aside from logistical issues a college football bubble would pose, such an arrangement would push the limits of amateurism. Asking players to leave campus (where they take classes, which are allegedly the priority) and spend months at a time separated from family and friends without compensating them for it while millionaire professional athletes make the same sacrifice would be dubious, to say the least.

If the NCAA had admitted back in 2014 (or in any of the years since) that it ran a professional sport, it would have been prepared, or at least more so, to handle the complications that have arisen due to the pandemic. Players would be compensated and have a seat at the table to discuss safety protocols that primarily affect them.

But it didn’t do any of that. And that shouldn’t be surprising.

After all, there’s a lot more money to be made in exploiting free labor than there is in blowing up that system of free labor for no reason, aside from ethics.

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That logic goes out the window in a time of crisis, however. The cracks in the system are showing, and it’s abundantly clear that the NCAA’s model of amateurism wasn’t at all prepared to handle a disruption of this scale.

The powers that be could have recognized this at any point in the last five months. Instead of twiddling its thumbs while professional leagues arrived at actual solutions, the NCAA could have followed their lead and worked to create a comprehensive answer while also compensating players and improving their standing in the future. Once again, it did not do that.

Granted, even if players secured the rights they deserve, such as compensation and organization, trying to pull off a season would be walking a tenuous line. But college sports wouldn’t be facing obstacles unique from the rest of the sporting world.

And when Saturdays this fall are occupied by the NFL, just remember that the NCAA has had literal decades to make its model more resilient to an event like this one.

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Historic player organization movements are only the beginning

If a players union is ever going to exist at the college level, it will not come from the generosity of college athletics administrators.

Earlier this week, a group of Pac-12 players sent a letter to the Players’ Tribune with a list of demands for the conference and are threatening to opt-out of the 2020 football season should those demands not be met.

The list was later shared by a number of Pac-12 athletes on Twitter, including Oregon star Penei Sewell, who is a projected early first-round pick in the 2021 NFL Draft.

The players’ demands cover a wide range of issues, from COVID-19 safety to racial justice and compensation. For COVID-19 protections, players want the ability to opt-out of the season free from punishment within their programs and for safety standards to be maintained by a third party. To protect the status of all sports during the pandemic, they are demanding pay cuts from Commissioner Larry Scott, as well as coaches and administrators.

They also want the right to profit off their name, image and likeness, as well as the distribution of 50 percent of total conference revenue from each sport evenly among the athletes in those sports.

In response to this, players across the nation voiced their support for the movement, including Florida defensive end Zachary Carter.

Groups of players in both the Big 10 and Mountain West followed suit, giving their own list of demands to conference administrators. However, the lists of demands from those conferences aren’t as broad as that of the Pac-12 players. They only address COVID-19 safety and not wider-reaching social issues.

These movements have shown unprecedented levels of player organization at a time when it is desperately needed. As players unions in the NBA, MLB and NFL have negotiated substantive protections for their players, college athletes — who have no representation whatsoever — have been largely forced to go along with the (generally terrible) decisions made by those who allegedly care about their best interest.

Of course, the players have power; any group of organized laborers does. It’s the reason trade unions exist in the first place. But without a union (which the players desperately need for a number of reasons, as the Pac-12 players have demonstrated), the players are essentially powerless as individuals.

That’s why these grassroots organizational movements are so important. Once players realize they have power in numbers, they will be able to affect change within the system. Maybe not everything they are demanding, but significant change nonetheless.

If a players union is ever going to exist at the college level, it will not come from the generosity of college athletics administrators. Allowing the players, who aren’t technically employees, to unionize would give the game away for the NCAA. If players can collectively bargain, the current system of college athletics would be burned to the ground.

And it should be.

Because ultimately, the value of college sports isn’t derived from the NCAA. It comes from the players. And the only way the players will get what they deserve is if they force the issue through organized, collective action.

If met, the demands of the Pac-12 players would preclude the league from competing in NCAA-sanctioned events, as nearly all of them violate current amateurism rules. But, so what? Do the conferences really need the NCAA to survive?

Talking to ESPN, Ramogi Huma, founder of the college athletics advocacy group the National College Players Association, phrased the answer succinctly.

Huma said the players are aware that if the Pac-12 met their demands that the conference would not be eligible to participate in NCAA-sanctioned competitions or championships.

“Right now, it’s clear that the conferences don’t need the NCAA. Each conference is an industry unto itself,” Huma said. “[The players are saying,] ‘We’re fine if our conference doesn’t belong to the NCAA at all. We need to be treated fairly.'”

Don’t misunderstand, some reforms are certainly possible within the system, as state legislators allowing players to be compensated for the use of their names, images and likenesses shows.

But historically, massive, systemic reforms for labor groups tend to stem from one thing and one thing only: tireless and unflinching advocacy from the laborers themselves until those taking advantage of them have no choice remaining but to listen.

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The NFL has no choice but to force Daniel Snyder to sell the Washington team

Do the right thing, Roger (and other owners.)

After days of wild speculation, the Washington Post published its bombshell report on the Washington NFL team’s toxic culture. The scope of the story didn’t match the scope of the internet’s wild conspiracy theories. There was no ref bribing or reporters catphishing team employees for scoops.

No, it was far more sinister than that.

Fifteen women who worked for the team said they were sexually harassed and verbally abused by several team employees, including former director of pro personnel Alex Santos and play-by-play man/senior vice president of content Larry Michael. The story features horrifying accounts from a number of former employees and reporters who covered the team.

Via The Washington Post:

“The allegations raised by [former employee Emily] Applegate and others — running from 2006 to 2019 — span most of Snyder’s tenure as owner and fall into two categories: unwelcome overtures or comments of a sexual nature, and exhortations to wear revealing clothing and flirt with clients to close sales deals.”

If you’ve been listening to women, this type of environment being tolerated by a professional sports organization should not come as a surprise. That this particular organization — and surely it’s not the only one — was tolerating it should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Snyder showed what little regard he had for women when he signed Reuben Foster just days after the linebacker’s second domestic violence arrest. And that came just months after a New York Times report alleged team execs required cheerleaders to pose topless during photoshoots attended by FedEx Field suite owners. The cheerleaders were also told to accompany employees of sponsors on trips to nightclubs.

Via The New York Times:

Their participation did not involve sex, the cheerleaders said, but they felt as if the arrangement amounted to “pimping us out.” What bothered them was their team director’s demand that they go as sex symbols to please male sponsors, which they did not believe should be a part of their job.

Unlike former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who was forced to sell his team in 2018, Snyder was not directly implicated in any of this behavior, but there’s no way he was completely oblivious to the toxicity that pervaded his franchise. And if he was oblivious to it, that might actually be worse. As Roger Goodell told the Saints before doling out punishment for Bountygate, “Ignorance is not an excuse.”

Ignorance clearly isn’t the problem in Washington. It’s apathy. The same apathy left Snyder unaffected by the Native American groups that were imploring him to change the team’s racist name for decades (he only acquiesced when sponsors threaten to hurt his bottom line.)

Even if Snyder had been unaware of this pattern of abusive behavior, you’d think the 2018 New York Times story would have set off some alarm bells and sparked some sort of internal investigation — the kind of internal investigation the team has now launched after they were notified by the Post of the allegations featured in the story published Thursday. But nope. Snyder turned a blind eye to it all, and, therefore, allowed it to persist.

Complain about “cancel culture” all you want. The fact is, Daniel Snyder has proven again and again that he’s not someone the league should want owning one of its teams. He’s created the opposite of the culture the league should be trying to cultivate and the other owners have a right to protect the league.

Now the focus shifts to the NFL and Goodell, who constantly tries to convince us this league cares about women and people of color. On multiple occasions, this owner has shown us he does not care about either. That shouldn’t be tolerated and Snyder should be forced out, as many NFL fans are now calling for.

Will Goodell take this opportunity to prove his words weren’t hollow? If he doesn’t, it’s going to be hard to take him, or this league, seriously on any of these matters going forward. We already expect them to get so many things wrong — remember when they acknowledged their mistake in how they treated protesting players without even mentioning Colin Kaepernick? — but this appears to be a real chance to make a significant and lasting change.

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Expect the SEC and other collegiate conferences to follow the Big 10’s lead

Any reasonable person has known for some time that if college football happens this fall it will look drastically different than ever before

Any reasonable person has known for some time now that should a college football season occur this fall, it will look drastically different than any other season we’ve ever seen. The only question was, how so?

The first domino in answering that question fell Thursday afternoon, as the Big 10 announced that it would be scrapping all scheduled nonconference games and moving to a conference-only football schedule.

Not only does this alter the schedules of Big 10 teams, but also every team that was scheduled to play a Big 10 team in non-conference play. As a result, it’s just a matter of time until the rest of the FBS makes the same call.

The PAC 12 has been reportedly considering doing the same for months now, and according to Stadium’s Brett McMurphy, the ACC is likely to move to a conference-only schedule, as well.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said that the league will wait as long as possible to make final decisions but that it will also discuss the possibility of eliminating nonconference games.

These are important first steps from the Power Five, which until now hasn’t taken nearly as proactive a course as, for instance, the NBA has. But this also feels like an abrupt turn in strategy.

Just weeks ago, Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith suggested that they could put 40-50,000 fans in the stadium. On Thursday, his tone changed drastically.

“I am very concerned,” Smith said, when asked about playing fall sports in general. “I used to be cautiously optimistic, but I’m not even there now. When you look at our trajectory with the virus, we are either the worst country or one of the worst. We wanted September available to use to provide flexibility and control to handle disruptions.”

The Big 10’s announcement was less of a proactive step than it was a scramble. College football waited too long to take concrete steps to ensure the season could be conducted safely, and now the entire season is jeopardized.

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Most, if not all, Power Five leagues will do the same thing the Big 10 did. Most Group of Five leagues will, as well. But it’s not going to save the season.

Moving to a conference-only schedule is the last gasp from college sports administrators realizing the error of their ways. Because, though clearly a step in the right direction, nixing nonconference games isn’t the answer.

Sure, it keeps programs’ travel generally region-locked, but at this point, with over 3 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States, spreading the disease to new places isn’t really the concern. The concern is keeping the thousands of players, coaches and personnel safe while somehow limiting collateral in the travel process. A conference-only schedule doesn’t begin to solve all of these problems.

There’s only one answer: delaying the season.

Right now, college football is setting itself up for a disaster. Administrators are either too stubborn or too invested to see the writing on the wall, and they’re going to create a massive headache for themselves.

Barring something unforeseen changing in the next month and a half, outbreaks will be an inevitability this fall. When that happens, the season will be stopped and either canceled or postponed.

Assuming this is the case, college football has two options: Delay the start of the season with the hope that a more normal season is possible later on, or devise a complicated plan for a fall start that will more likely than not fail, resulting in a delayed season anyway but with the added hurdle of dealing with a restart instead of just a delayed start.

The former option is, in my opinion, clearly superior. But it seems that those in power are more interested in the latter. When that comes to pass, the months wasted arguing about precisely how many fans can safely be shoved into metal bleachers will be all the more damning.

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The NHL says it will continue its relationships with law enforcement “artfully and carefully”

Police brutality is driving protests across the country.

The NHL community—players, teams and the league itself—are not known for commenting on political issues. The past week has been a sea change for a hockey culture that has long prided itself on being apolitical.

Now, white NHL players are openly using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, posting on social media about systemic racism, and joining their black teammates in calling out social injustice.  It’s no longer just Evander Kane or Akim Aliu or J.T. Brown carrying the burden for the entire league.

In hockey circles, the conversation has centered around racism in the sport, but it is unchecked police brutality in the death of George Floyd that’s driving worldwide outrage.  The NHL and players have so far centered their public remarks around racism and white privilege, but statements can only go so far.

As open discourse around these issues grow, the NHL faces a harder question. Namely, how, in the wake of police brutality protests, does the league plan to handle its existing relationship with law enforcement agencies?

The NHL, like every other sports league, has interwoven law enforcement appreciation into the fabric of its games.  Police officers drop pucks, a Blue Lives Matter flag has been displayed on the ice during at least one NHL game, and almost ever team has a law enforcement appreciation night.

In the wake of Floyd’s death and the protests for police reform, ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski asked Kim Davis, the NHL Executive Vice President of Social Impact, how the league plans to move forward with those relationships, considering the changed climate.

Artfully and carefully to answer your question, is how we’re going to use these relationships,” Davis said. “I think at this moment we have to be highly sensitized to the fact that people are feeling a great deal of tension in communities between the police—this is an institutional and systemic matter, not an individual matter. Right, this is not about individual people, this is not a good or bad, this is about systems. As we look to the resumption of play and ultimately being back in the stadium, we will all have to interrogate and investigate how we ensure that those relationships are continued to be perceived as positive in the way that we illuminate them, is perceived as positive as relative to these fans that are feeling compromised by police brutality.

Davis’ statement falls apart at the end there, because there’s no way to hold both sides of this issue. Supporting Black Lives Matter, as so many NHL players have said that they do, also means supporting aggressive police reforms. That sentiment does not go hand in hand with the blind appreciation teams and the NHL have shown for law enforcement agencies in the past.

That all begs a very difficult question of how players and teams will handle these situations moving forward.  Will law enforcement appreciation nights continue? Are we headed for a round of “not all cops?” Are players going to shore up the “one bad apple” defense? Will they commit to easier, middle-of-the-road solutions, like 8 Can’t Wait? Will anyone start talking about defunding the police?

These are questions that are bound to make many players and team officials uncomfortable over the coming months and that’s a good thing.  Privilege has long insulated players and the league from having to answer hard questions about their support of law enforcement agencies. Now that they’ve opened the door to further discussion, it’s time to walk through it.

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