Male sports media disgraces itself in attempts to cover Caitlin Clark’s rookie WNBA season

Any question whether Caitlin Clark, the star rookie with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, brings the best out of her opponents vanishes with a close look at the stats.

Clark, who averaged 31.6 points per game on 45.5 per cent shooting during her supernova final season at the University of Iowa, is putting up 15.6 points in her first 11 WNBA games, converting 35.7 per cent of her field goal attempts. Part of the statistical drop-off owes to the jump from college to pro. The WNBA, for now, includes just 12 teams, and only 144 active roster spots. If your numbers drop off early in your rookie season, that’s not a cause to panic. It’s just life on the other side of the bottleneck.

But people more knowledgeable about basketball than I am also point out that teams employ defensive blitzes against Clark regularly. Disproportionately. Nearly 60 times in the season’s first two weeks, according to one sharp-eyed analyst. When other teams know they’re facing Clark, who is among the highest-profile rookies in the league’s history, they know to bring their stingiest defence.

As for Clark, who led Iowa to the NCAA championship game this past season, she’s a rookie but she’s still a pro. She’ll adjust, eventually.

But male-dominated mainstream media outlets tasked with covering a historic WNBA season, in which Clark is a central character, face a similarly steep learning curve.

And they’re struggling.

If you don’t believe me, check out Pat McAfee, who makes $17 million US a year spouting high-volume sports opinions on ESPN, and who opened a recent WNBA segment by dumping on the league and its newest big-name player.

“I would like the media people who continue to say ‘This rookie class, this rookie class, this rookie class…’ Nah, just call it what it is,” he said. “There’s this one white b—h for the Indiana team who is a superstar.”

McAfee later apologized, claiming he meant the sexist epithet as a compliment.

Oh.

That’s way less offensive.

Coming from a man.

Got it.

McAfee isn’t the only media member with a megaphone and a half-baked WNBA take this spring; he’s just among the loudest and most recent, and he’s indicative of a problem that’s much bigger than whether the Fever can devise a way to liberate Clark and her high-octane offensive skills.

Clark, let’s remember, also brings a pre-existing rivalry with fellow standout rookie Angel Reese to the pros, and together they could become WNBA’s version of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — transcendent players with crossover appeal who can help propel their league to a new level of popularity. Factor in the news, first broken by my amazing colleague Shireen Ahmed, that the WNBA is expanding to Toronto in 2026, and this spring is shaping up as the opening stage of a dynamic new era for the league.

Except that daily WNBA happenings are now, to a greater extent than ever, fuelling a (mostly male) sports talk industry full of overnight experts with strong, often sexist views, occasionally tinged with racism and homophobia. McAfee’s rant has a chance to help us correct the direction in which WNBA conversations have drifted since Clark entered the league.

Should WNBA fans and stakeholders appreciate sustained attention from agenda-setting sports talkers like McAfee?

Sure. Earned media has value. If some percentage of McAfee’s vast audience watches the next WNBA broadcast, it’s a small victory. If they start buying tickets and merch, it’s an even bigger win.

But should folks accept a big-money host casually tossing around B-words as the price of the extra publicity?

Come on.

If your audience traffics in that kind of misogyny, maybe the WNBA isn’t for them. And taken together, all these stunts threaten to suck the fun out of a historic WNBA season.

McAfee isn’t the only offender of course.

In April, Indianapolis Star columnist named Gregg Doyel hijacked Clark’s introductory news conference with an awkward, unsolicited, report-you-to-HR-worthy attempt to flirt with her. The paper later announced that he wouldn’t cover the Fever this season.

Earlier this week, notorious hot-take artist Clay Travis claimed that Black lesbian WNBA players target Clark for hard fouls because she’s white and heterosexual.

NBA Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkley is on the record saying Clark is the victim of petty jealousy from WNBA incumbents.

There are more, and then there’s McAfee, who knows how to avoid inflammatory language when he feels like it. In January he earned social media cult hero status for alertly steering this College Gameday discussion away from a collision with the N-word.

WATCH | Clark comes up big in 1st Fever victory of the season:

But that conversation centred on male football players. That McAfee felt so comfortable with the B-word hints at how little he and his audience value the feelings and achievements of the WNBA players in question.

That segment unfolded in the context of last Sunday’s game between the Fever and the Chicago Sky, during which Chicago’s Chennedy Carter sent Clark to the floor with a hip-check. Reese, seated on Chicago’s bench, cheered the hard foul. Carter was whistled for a flagrant foul, but refused to discuss the play with reporters afterward. Taken together those details fit neatly with the Everybody Hates Caitlin subplot that’s been percolating all spring.

Right here, it helps to remind myself, and my audience, that I’m not a WNBA expert, and would never pretend to be.

Is this bullying, or a rough intro to a rugged league, and a run-of-the-mill humbling of a young hot shot? I’ll defer to people with deeper WNBA knowledge, who can put all these hard fouls in context.

Otherwise I’d wind up like the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, which added this blazing hot take to the ongoing discussion about Carter running Clark over.

“Outside a sporting contest, it would have been seen as an assault,” read a tweet linking to an opinion piece on the incident.

Either you understand that a lot of sports include acts that are illegal in real life, or you show up at car races and complain about speeding. If you’re that second type of person, and you work for a major publication, it’s likely time to stick to something other than sports.

This spring circumstances have aligned to earn the WNBA unprecedented attention from mainstream media outlets; some sports opinioneers have responded by reducing players to a series of stereotypes — reverse racists, B-words, heterophobes and catty backstabbers.

It’s easy to run up social media engagement stats talking that way, but much tougher to do what actually serves your audience: talking less, listening to actual experts, and recognizing that opinions carry more weight when they’re informed.