The talk of the sports world over the last several months has been Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark, and she has become such a major talking point that anyone in the sports media landscape virtually has to have an opinion on her, whether good or bad.
Some of the opinions that are coming out are getting torn to shreds though, whether good or bad.
That’s what former Pittsburgh Steelers running back great Le’Veon Bell is quickly learning, as he’s facing some backlash on social media for his recent comments about Clark. Though Bell was working to be positive and highlight the good that Clark has done in the WNBA, some factual inaccuracies are being pointed out.
© Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports© Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
On Monday, Bell reposted a video of WNBA crowd sizes compared over the past several years, starting with a New York Liberty game in 2021 and going all the way up through a Fever game in 2024.
His caption was “The Caitlin Clark effect is insane.”
From a glance, that observation is correct. But if you start to break it down a bit, there are some holes in the argument.
For starters, consider the fact that in 2021, few people were attending sporting events as we continued to deal with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Showing crowd shots from this time is misleading from the outset.
Then consider that each year after that — 2022 and 2023 — leading into the so-called “Caitlin Clark era” shows a big increase in crowd size. This displays that the league was growing before Clark joined this past year, and it wasn’t just her that sparked this fan explosion.
Needless to say, some fans pointed this out to Bell on social media.
To take several years of growth in the league and attribute it to the doings of one single player — a rookie — instead of the dozens of hard-working individuals who have had a major part in the WNBA’s transformation is what many are finding troubling.
My favorite part of it all, though, was Bell’s admission about his fandom of the league in one of the comments.
There’s no better depiction of our current landscape of sports media than a prominent name in the industry having a hot take on a situation, and then later admitting that they don’t even watch the sport.
What a world we live in…
Relative Articles
None found
