For context, Major League Baseball debuted its Sunday Night Baseball package in May for a classic matchup between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. Viewership clocked in at 2.5 million despite being in primetime, unlike the Aces-Fever game. Regular-season NBA games on ABC and ESPN averaged 1.9 million viewers last season. And the NHL only averaged about 600,000 viewers.

Needless to say, the WNBA is now literally playing with the big boys, especially when Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham of the Fever are playing. The league, therefore, should be flying high.

Instead, the very opposite is happening.

Take what recently occurred in a matchup between the Fever and the Chicago Sky. Cunningham was on a fast break, went to the rim, and was clotheslined by Chicago’s DiJonai Carrington. This wasn’t just any hard foul — it was with intent to injure Cunningham because there was no play for the ball. Amazingly, Cunningham scored the bucket despite crashing hard to the floor. Carrington was tossed from the game for the flagrant foul.

But afterward, Carrington ran to social media to write, “White Privilege,” while tagging the Fever. It was a clear shot at Cunningham due to her skin color.

This was a blatant example of a player taunting the league and a fellow player. Why would Carrington attempt to injure Cunningham this way?

It’s not hard to figure out: Cunningham has been outspoken in her opposition to biological males playing against women in sports. Carrington has an opposite view.

Almost anyone who has seen this play is sympathetic to Cunningham. But Sports Illustrated, in one of the most insane headlines you’ll ever see in sports or otherwise, published the following: “Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma After Drawing Flagrant Foul in Fever-Sky.”

Karma over what? SI quietly changed the headline after overwhelming blowback.

And after a flagrant foul like this occurs, one would think Cunningham’s coach would defend her player. Instead, Fever coach Stephanie White praised Carrington instead in what can only be called a bizarre statement.

“Look, it was a hard foul,” White said. “I don’t think DiJonai intentionally came out to get her across the neck like she did. But it did happen, and I thought it was the right call. One of the things about Nai is that she’s going to play her butt off, man, she’s going to compete. Nobody’s going to go walking in for a layup. I don’t oppose the hard foul, but I also don’t think that she intentionally went for the neck.”

White also oddly claimed that she didn’t see the play in real time, which the video shows is a lie: White is looking directly at the two players.

“How are you the head coach and you didn’t see the play?” ESPN’s Stephen A Smith asked. “It’s your job to watch the game. How did you not see the play?”

What the hell is happening here?

The result is that coach White, an Indiana native who once led Purdue to a national championship, was booed at home during the Fever’s next game against the New York Liberty.

We’ve seen this movie before. Last month, Clark was knocked down in a game against Phoenix. But while on the court, the Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas punched Clark directly in the throat, which could have killed her. Initially, no foul was called. Nothing. Only after severe backlash online did the league review the play and decide to suspend Thomas for one game.

Just one game. That’s it.

The treatment of Clark overall has been a combination of patently stupid and downright disturbing. Again, this is a transformational player not seen since the likes of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. A quick review: In the late ’70s, Bird and Johnson were drafted by the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, respectively. At the time, the NBA was much like the WNBA was before Clark: a league largely irrelevant, to the point that the NBA Finals were shown on tape delay as late as 11:30 p.m. Eastern because so few watched.

Bird and Johnson, who met in the 1979 NCAA national championship game, changed all of that with the creation of arguably the most heated rivalry in all of sports between the Celtics and Lakers. The teams won a combined eight titles in the 1980s. In 1984 alone, 42 million tuned in to Game 7 of the NBA Finals to see the Celtics top the Lakers. Five years earlier, just 7.5 million watched the Seattle SuperSonics defeat the Washington Bullets.

The same goes for Clark: Before she came into the league after nearly winning a national championship at Iowa to much fanfare, the league almost never drew more than 400,000 viewers to its regular-season games. But in the Clark era, Fever games and other big matchups are regularly attracting 1 million to 3 million viewers. As for attendance, the WNBA averaged 6,600 fans a game in 2023 pre-Clark. Since she debuted, more than 11,000 fans have attended per game league-wide.

Her stats speak for themselves: In 2024, she averaged 19.2 points per game along with 8.4 assists and 5.7 rebounds, which resulted in her winning WNBA Rookie of the Year. But heading into the Olympics, she was snubbed from the women’s roster of 12 players in what is one of the most boneheaded decisions in the history of sports.

And just to underscore how out of touch the league has become, in a game on Sunday night between the Fever and the Atlanta Dream, the Dream players all refused to stand for the national anthem. Directly afterward, team officials honored two-time Georgia gubernatorial loser and election denier Stacey Abrams before a sellout crowd.

Legacy media have been horrific as well. USA Today leads the way, with one piece in July accusing Clark of missing an all-star weekend “Orange Carpet” event to get her hair done. It turns out Clark missed the Orange Carpet event in order to host a charity event in Iowa instead. USA Today changed the headline as a result.

And in another hit piece, USA Today columnist Nancy Armour defended the league for not protecting Clark from being targeted by blaming Clark herself for not recognizing “the wider consequences of her actions.”

“It shouldn’t need reminding that this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of ’defending’ white women,” Armour wrote. “The WNBA’s All-Star Game this weekend is in Chicago, Emmett Till’s hometown, and a local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the wider consequences of her actions.”

WHAT THE WNBA OWES ENES KANTER, BY ITS OWN LOGIC

Armour later apologized, but how did this ridiculous perspective see the light of day in the first place?

The WNBA has a huge opportunity to be relevant for a long time after being irrelevant for so many years before. But the league seems hell-bent on becoming a laughingstock once again.