I used to watch football. I don’t anymore. As we’ve learned more about CTE, there’s just no joy or pleasure in watching a small number of (already rich) people make huge sums of money while one in four players are left with brain trauma.

But sports are an indelible part of the pop cultural fabric, which is why news bleeds through even to non-sports fans, like myself.

Take college football. Last weekend, the University of Texas was down in the fourth quarter against Ohio State, only to claw its way back for an improbable win.

What happened next has become a nesting doll of misogyny, going from bad to worse.

The game aired nationally on ABC, which pays hundreds of millions of dollars for the broadcast rights. These deals usually include access to coaches in-game, at half-time and post-game. 

I tend to think sideline interviews are as productive as Hollywood red carpet interviews: Too rushed and too general to be of interest. But I suppose they do give you a glimpse into someone’s personality. How well can they “perform” professionalism and charisma when the pressure — the camera — is on?

Not well, apparently, if you’re Texas coach Steve Sarkisian. After the game, he blew off sideline reporter Holly Rowe, who did nothing to cover for his behavior.

Plenty of sideline reporters handle these moments differently, explaining away the rudeness with a version “Well, he clearly wants to celebrate with his team.” But I don’t think anyone should have to do that, because it’s not a reporter’s job to perform PR cleanup for a team, a coach or a player.

It only got worse from there.

Sarkisian pounded sand. Rowe, turning heel, did the same. And, as a result, some people criticized her for “stomping” out of frame because she “didn’t get what she wanted.” To be clear, it’s her job to get the interview — that’s what her employer wanted.

Rowe has been a college sideline reporter for ESPN since 1998. Maybe you like her work and maybe you don’t. But she’s been at this for a long time and knows the drill. She’s not the equivalent of an inexperienced influencer armed with a microphone, many of whom are now the default at movie premieres and awards shows in recent years.

But even if she were, or if she were a new reporter learning the ropes, is it too much to expect a head coach who makes nearly $11 million a year to take 60 seconds to be civil and offer an answer or two? 

There were also comments about Rowe’s appearance and her weight — not thin or pretty enough and therefore deserving of Sarkisian’s bad manners. 

Inevitably, someone made an AI video of that moment on the field after the game that invents a new scenario: Sarkisian slapping Rowe across the face.

What should have been a celebratory moment for Texas was rapidly skidding off course in terms of PR. 

Well, you’re thinking, maybe the team’s quarterback — with that dynastic last name — was able to save things during his own press conference the next day. Nope.

When Arch Manning, grandson of Archie Manning and nephew to Peyton and Eli Manning, sat down in front of reporters, the AI video came up and he laughed, deeming it “hilarious.”

According to CBS, here’s what happened in the media room:

A tangible portion of the Texas press corps, which includes print and television, can be heard laughing along while Manning delivered his response. Evan Vieth, the reporter who asked Manning the question, tweeted the video with the added caption that Manning's answer was "gold." The video quickly went viral Monday evening and as of Tuesday morning has been viewed more than 20 million times. 

Gold. Right. Got it. (The post is still up, which I suppose one could argue is either transparency … or opportunism.)

Those people laughing along with Manning? Rowe’s colleagues. What are we doing?

The Big Lead was one of many outlets covering this angle of the story, and the headline caught my eye: “Media turns on Arch Manning after mention of Steve Sarkisian-Holly Rowe AI video”

That’s a fascinating way to describe what happened, and on so many levels.

By Tuesday, both Manning and Vieth had apologized.

Eventually Sarkisian weighed in as well, but it wasn’t an apology so much as an acknowledgment that his behavior was … impatient:

If hindsight's 20/20, if I could do it all over again, I would have exuded more patience in that moment and sat through and waited for the interview with Holly. Obviously, we have a ton of respect for ESPN and Holly. Holly and I go way back to even to my days of playing at BYU, and we've got a great relationship. ESPN is a great partner of ours.

Saying you have respect for someone after treating them with disrespect is a childish rhetorical choice, but I’m sure it will satisfy most.

It’s also conspicuous that ABC/ESPN has made no public statement standing by Rowe and laying out the company’s expectations as to how its personnel is treated while on the job. Rowe buried her mother earlier this week, news which some met with yet more derision because even basic compassion is a bridge too far?

This is so deeply stupid.

But I say all of this because I want to think through the cognitive dissonance sports fans are asked to swallow. 

On one hand, you have pro teams actively courting women via rom-coms, from the NFL’s collaboration with Hallmark (“Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story,” coming this Christmas) to the Chicago Cubs’ scripted TikTok series “Nine Innings to Love.”

As a marketing gambit, it’s patronizing — most women I know are as interested in strategy and gameplay and athletic talent as anyone else; they don’t need a metaphorical umbrella in their drink to make it palatable — but presumably a whole bunch of people with MBA’s are convinced this is how you grow female interest. Whatever.

Back in the real world, there’s considerable evidence suggesting women are chumps for having sincere interest in men’s sports, be it professionally (in Rowe’s case) or recreationally as fans who are forking over their time, money and enthusiasm.

Since the name Manning came up, shall we dig up that old chestnut about Peyton Manning from his college days, when an assistant trainer at the University of Tennessee filed a sexual harassment complaint against the men’s athletic department? There were 33 verified complaints, which included:

… student trainers barge into a storage room where she changed clothes; being the subject of a song with sexual innuendo sung by the track team; being called by the nickname “bumper,” referring to the size of her breasts — a nickname about which she had complained in 1992; being given false tickets with breasts drawn on them by Athletics Department administrator Gus Manning [no relation to Peyton]; and a much-publicized incident on February 29, 1996, when quarterback Peyton Manning dropped his shorts above her head while she was attending to his foot in the training room.

Mike Rollo, associate athletics trainer, used the term “mooning” to refer to Manning’s actions. Manning contended he meant to “moon” another athlete (who subsequently sided with Whited in asserting that the incident was more severe than a simple prank). Whited immediately took three months’ medical leave, citing the Manning incident as the reason. Manning apologized and was punished by being required to do extra running.

In August 1997 Whited reached a $300,000 settlement.

That was 30 years ago.

But we can run down a more recent list of events, none of them good.

Lane Kiffin is the head coach at LSU and this weekend the football team is playing Ole Miss, where Kiffin was the coach from 2020-2025.

I don’t know anything about Kiffin except that he seems pretty dumb; when it came to questions of player eligibility, according to a lawyer friend of his: “Usually, when I would express an opinion about what LSU was doing, Lane would reply with a screenshot from ChatGPT that supported LSU's position, which was almost always wrong.”

Anyway, even I could predict Kiffin’s impending return would juice the anticipation and drama.

He also has a daughter, Landry, who attends Ole Miss. In the days leading up to the game, she has been the “subject of several vulgar bed sheet banners being hung around campus this week, all suggesting she had sexual relations with a former Ole Miss player.”

Targeting the daughter of a man who is the head coach of your rival — as if her sexual history, real or imagined, is anyone’s business, let alone some kind of gotcha — is a choice that resides in the same neighborhood as that ugly AI video.

This shit is actually dehumanizing when it starts to add up.

Last month, the YouTube channel Good Good Golf and equipment maker Callaway released an ad for a new golf club wherein “Garrett Clark, one of the co-founders of Good Good, [is seen] shoulder-checking [golfer] Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she went to touch his co-branded Good Good x Callaway driver.”

The ad was pulled. Callaway cut ties with the channel, the latter of which also announced it was “stepping away from its partnership with the PGA Tour to be the named title sponsor of a tournament in November, an event that had been heralded as the coming together of golf’s old guard and new influencers.”

On one hand, at least there was a swift response. On the other, are we really supposed to breathe a sigh of relief when someone acknowledges this is fucked up?

Even in womens sports, some version of this is going on, with malcontents tossing dildos onto the court at WNBA games. Bringing a sex toy into someone’s workplace sits squarely in the category of harassment and what is wrong with you???

Let’s keep going.

Last week, Alexander Zverev won the men’s singles at the US Open. But off the tennis court, he has been “accused of abuse by two former partners, allegations he denies but that nonetheless hang over him at every tournament given the in-depth, horrifying accounts reported by the journalist Ben Rothenberg,” per a column by Owen Lewis that recently ran in GQ.

Rothenberg, by the way, has said that since his reporting ran, it’s become increasingly difficult for him to get credentials to the Grand Slams or access to players. Read into that what you will.

Back to the GQ piece, where Lewis says that, “By and large, Zverev is the sport’s only appreciable blemish”:

But that’s not how he sees it. After winning the French Open, Zverev told the journalist Quentin Moynet that the accusations against him had been "proven false," which is untrue. And after settling the case in 2024, Zverev made it clear he feels he has nothing to answer for. "I never, ever want to hear another question about the subject again,” he said in a French Open press conference. “That goes out to everybody." For the most part, everyone’s abided.

After the U.S. Open final, he answered questions from the press corps, “each of which were about tennis. But there should be no mistaking what was on many people’s minds.”

We haven’t even touched on the many allegations of domestic violence in professional football, baseball, hockey, you name it, which rarely hamper a player’s career. 

I have a lot of appreciation for the work done by journalist Bradford William Davis for his site Eyeblack, such as this one from August: For the second time since 2024, the NBA was accused of investigating a player's misconduct without interviewing a woman who came forward.

And MLB's domestic violence probes show a system without standards from May.

And from June: The NYPD investigated his brutality complaints six times. Then, MLB hired him. The details are concerning:

Slapping. Shoving. Verbal assaults. Beatings. 

Usually, we surface these kinds of claims when women come forward against their pro athlete partners.

But, this isn’t about the women who accused baseball stars like Trevor Bauer, José Reyes, and Mike Clevinger of domestic violence. This is about the guy Major League Baseball sent to handle their cases, a former Marine and longtime cop who knows abuse investigations. Both sides.

Ricardo Burnham, a MLB senior investigator responsible for probing players accused of violent misconduct, himself had nearly a dozen police brutality or misconduct allegations during his past life as a New York Police Department (NYPD) detective.

Then there’s the sports betting site that hired Sydney Sweeney to strip down and entice people to gamble their money away.

These apps will be the ruin of many who use them, so I’m not arguing for a more enlightened ad campaign. I’m just pointing out the subtext here, which is that women are eye candy, but not the real audience for sports — or even accomplished athletes in their own right.

Women — and people who actually like women — are asked to blow off a lot of crap in the name of sports.

Or as this Twitter user bluntly put it:

Meanwhile, all of this is happening against a backdrop of trans panic that purports to be about “protecting” girls and women. The city of San Francisco has an office of transgender initiatives and on its website there’s an article that notes:

Rather than protecting women’s sports, bans on trans athletes encourage bullying, discrimination, and even violence against women and girls.

Taking everything into context, those aforementioned rom-com marketing efforts are not just corny, but insulting to everyone’s intelligence.

The headline on a recent column from USA Today writer Nancy Armour says it all:

US sports respect women’s money. That’s where it ends.