My ‘hot take’ on our fearless sports pundits

On Covid, they were all hypocritical wimps.

Plenty of Paul Finebaum’s flame-throwing commentaries have entertained me, but “The Mouth of the South” knew he couldn’t challenge the Covid Current Thing pushed by his bosses at ESPN and the SEC

In my last column, I praised Ron DeSantis for displaying the courage to criticize a powerful woke company like Walt Disney.

As most people know, Walt Disney also owns ESPN, which now serves as a TV poster child for the woke ideology. 

Politically-correct liberalism is already well down the road to ruining sports, which is no trivial development as many of us depend on our love of sports to take our minds off the off-putting trends we see in the “real world.”

Years ago, I became struck by the fact almost all sports journalists think exactly like their colleagues in the News divisions. 

A few years ago ESPN got some sports journalism competition with the creation of The Athletic website. (I briefly subscribed to The Athletic until I cancelled my subscription when my posts defending unvaccinated athletes and coaches were censored.)

The New York Times recently bought The Athletic. So a site that was already woke is now going to become even more woke. This means virtually all the sports news I receive will be as crazy as the "news" news.  

The above explains why sports fans never see any stories about vaccine deaths or injuries among athletes. 

It also explains why nobody in sports departments ever criticized all the cancelled games, mandatory masking and four-times-a-week mandatory testing for asymptomatic athletes. 

Nor have I ever seen one article or TV segment pointing out that zero college and pro athletes have died from Covid proper. 

The key to journalism success is knowing what questions to NOT ask …

Sports punditry is replete with commentators known for their “hot takes,” wherein the scribes show how brave they are by lampooning some coach or athlete who embarrassed himself. Often, the critics zero in on the hypocrisy their targets displayed.

More than three years into our Covid times, I’ve still never heard one prominent sports talking head who was brave enough to criticize one aspect of the authorized Covid narratives.

That is, woke culture is now so endemic that every one of these fearless commentators is scared to death to challenge the Current Thing endorsed by their bosses at ESPN/Disney, The Athletic/New York Times or any Gannett newspaper. 

In sports media, just like news media, we have legions of cowards and hypocrites who continue to pose as brave, fearless truth-tellers.

Paul Finebaum, who host a popular show on The SEC Network,  is one of the best-known flame-throwing pundits. The SEC Network is owned by ESPN, which is owned by … Disney. The company is actually partners with the SEC … the same SEC that is a proud corporate partner of … Pfizer.

In the football season of 2020, Finebaum regularly talked about all the games that were cancelled because of “outbreaks” (outbreaks of asymptomatic “cases.”) 

While Finebaum has interviewed the SEC commissioner many times, I’ve never heard him ask this powerful sports czar any questions (much less hard questions) about the commissioner’s many ridiculous Covid decisions/mandates. 

This is the same commissioner who fined coaches five figures for not wearing a mask properly on the sidelines and demanded that every girls volleyball player and defensive back get tested at least three times a week.

My alma matter got robbed …

At least the SEC didn’t cancel its 2020 football season. Instead, the league knocked off two regular season games from the 2020 schedule. (In 2020, all SEC games were against other SEC teams.)

This decision was heralded as courage personified - SEC football fans would at least get to see 10 games. However, few people remember all the games with non-SEC schools that were cancelled … but I do.

This inflicted significant economic harm on the athletics program of my alma mater, Troy University. Troy was supposed to play Tennessee that season, a game that would have generated $1 million for a mid-major athletic department that needs every dollar it can get.

For the life of me, I still don’t understand why it was “safe” for Tennessee’s athletes to play Alabama … but not Troy.

I guess the thought was that Troy wasn’t testing its athletes four times a week … thus it was perfectly fine to steal $1 million from Troy (and basically discriminate against smaller athletic programs).

I also never understood why no sports pundits ever pointed out that every high school in Alabama (more than 400 of them) were playing high school games … and none of these teams were testing their athletes. 

Amazingly, despite no mandatory testing, no high school athletes died from Covid during these 10 to 15-game seasons.

Unlike most NFL teams, Major League baseball and the Big 10, The SEC commissioner and its league presidents did “allow” the schools to sell a few tickets to games. (In a 101,000-seat stadium, Alabama’s seating capacity was capped at 17,000).

This allowed any businesses Tuscaloosa’s mayor and Alabama’s governor “allowed” to remain open to sell beers, hamburgers and Bama T-shirts before or after the game.

No sports pundits ever talked about it, but the signature accomplishment of the best and brightest “leaders” of the sports world was to … cause massive and unnecessary economic hardship to businesses in college towns.

Needless to say, none of these mitigation mandates “protected” a single athlete or spectator.

As it turns out, no “super-spreader” events occurred at any stadium, all of which still had tens of thousands of visitors mingling in close quarters before, during and after games. 

The same was true in the thousands of high school games played in Alabama in the fall of 2020 with zero super-spreader events. 

As far as I can tell, the only economic beneficiary was the testing companies that performed three-times-a-week PCR tests on every student-athlete at these colleges.

It would have been nice if fearless questioners like Paul Finebaum, Jim Rome or Stephen A Smith at least asked a commissioner or two how many athletes or coaches had been hospitalized with Covid. Or: Of all the positive test results, how many athletes were actually “sick?”

In college and the pros, plenty of coaches and athletes were fined for not wearing their masks on the bus or while walking to the shower after practice. If any pundit criticized this bureaucrat-mandated theft, I missed this.

Nobody ever asked a commissioner or member of the myriad health and safety committees why it was okay for football players to not wear masks in tackling drills, but the same athletes HAD to wear masks in the locker room and on the team bus.

My own “hot take” is that these commissioners, college presidents and their bureaucratic underlings received a perverse thrill from being able to fine and punish the non-compliers. They loved viewing themselves as the enlightened ones who were saving lives.

They also knew they could act as The Health Gestapo because the Paul Finebaums of the sports-pundit world would never ask them to justify their dictator-like activities.

I wish they’d at least leave sports alone …

When the sports commissioners and owners are all woke and all buy into the false narratives … and all the sports journalists think the same way, we can be certain that sports many of us love, and viewed as an escape from the insanity sweeping the world, are going to be ruined as well.

People are already spending less money on tickets to attend sporting events (an inflation work-around) … a trend that no doubt will accelerate.

Just like Broadway Joe guaranteed the Jets would win Super Bowl III, Substacker Bill guarantees more people are going to be turned off by the woke culture of sports. 

The pro teams are owned by billionaires who will always support The Current Thing. The college programs are run by academic bureaucrats who haven’t identified a radical idea they won’t champion.  

We also know members of sports press will always stick their finger into the air and pick up on which way The Current Thing is blowing, and do their part to keep their jobs and not challenge any authorized narrative. 

I’ve yet to hear Ron DeSantis, Robert Kennedy Jr. or Donald Trump rail against the woke fascism that’s seeping into the sports world and sports media, but I wish they’d add a few sentences to their campaign speeches and expand the reach of this vent.

Those of us who appreciate the respite from the alarming trends in the Real World have long found solace in our teams’ weekend games. In the future, even this welcome distraction is going to be despoiled by woke busy bodies who will always cheer The (Stupid) Current Thing.