March Round Up!
Before I get to recapping the newsletter in March, I wanted to discuss a tweet that has been, as the kids say, living in my head rent-free for several days. It’s from some guy named David Hookstead, who I don’t know anything about except he writes for Outkick, the conservative sports outlet founded by Clay Travis. Anyway, here’s the tweet:
The premise of this tweet — that ESPN has gone “woke” and is now actively pushing a political agenda instead of sticking to sports — has been a right-wing complaint since at least 2014, so on one level this tweet is completely unsurprising. On the other hand: What the hell is he even talking about???
This tweet went up on a Tuesday. The reason there were no stories about the men’s tournament is that the men’s tournament is not played on Tuesday. This has been true for, basically, my entire life. Anyone who pays any attention to men’s college basketball knows this. Similarly, there were no stories about the “upcoming NFL draft” because the NFL draft is not until April 27th — it is only “upcoming” in the sense that all events in the future are upcoming. NFL fans know that the end of March is usually a slow period, between the beginning of free agency and the NFL Draft.
ALSO, there WERE stories on the ESPN website about all of these things! You just have to move your cursor over the little thing that says “NFL” or “NCAAM” and you can read stories ad infinitum about the men’s sports you want to read about. The reason it wasn’t on the home page specifically is that ESPN’s business is covering live events, and there were no live events in those sports that day.
The irony of all this is that conservative sports media has made its whole shtick out of complaining that ESPN and other “mainstream” sports outlets won’t stick to covering sports, and are instead injecting politics into everything. And yet they have whipped themselves into such a frenzy about this alleged political bias that they see it under their beds at night. They care so much about ESPN sticking to sports that they would rather the network cover games that didn’t happen or a draft that isn’t for six weeks than ACTUAL SPORTS. The same thing happened again a couple days later, when Jason Whitlock and other conservative sports media figures had a meltdown over a joke Mina Kimes made.
And, look, I have some sympathy here, even if I obviously disagree with these people politically. For one, I am obviously of the opinion that sports is inherently political, that no matter how much you try to “stick to sports” you will end up touching on political themes. And I also get the temptation to bash “the media,” and I definitely get hating ESPN! But it just shows how hopelessly limited any political ideology that isn’t based on an actual class analysis really is…
Here’s everything from Undrafted this month:
They’re putting XFL games on ESPN now! Hopefully that will show people how useless owners are…
The podcast returned with a solo John episode recapping all the Dan Snyder stuff. Anyway, he’s about to sell his team for $6 billion, so listen to this ep and you can say you knew him when he was barely even a billionaire…
COLLEGE BASKETBALL WEEK
If ever there was year that proved that the lack of a strict meritocracy is actually good…
Using an unknown player’s quest to break a hallowed record to look at why we’re so dismissive of structural explanations over individual ones.
Finally! A James/John podcast, as we returned for our third annual leftist bracket breakdown.
I hate being such a NIL skeptic, but I’m still skeptical…
I was a little hard on Roy Williams in this one…