No room at ESPN for women defending women’s sports

(The Daily Signal) – Turns out defending women’s sports is a no-go if you want a long career at ESPN.

Samantha Ponder, host of “Sunday NFL Countdown,” has been fired, according to The Athletic. Supposedly Ponder, who was reportedly in a three-year, $3 million-plus contract, was axed “for financial reasons, as ESPN nears the conclusion of its fiscal year at the end of September,” the sports publication owned by The New York Times reported.

Yeah, right.

Just this January, ESPN put out a glowing press release about how “Sunday NFL Countdown” was thriving. The show “earned its most-watched regular season since 2019 and its second-best since 2016 … . The viewership marks a significant 8% jump from the 2022 season and was up 15% from the 2021 season,” the sports network boasted, noting additionally that “Sunday NFL Countdown” had increased its audience among women and young adults.

Maybe the spike in viewers for the 2023 season was because Ponder was expressing popular views.

Ponder made waves in May of 2023 when she retweeted former collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines, who competed against Lia Thomas, a biological male, and has since become an outspoken advocate of banning men from women’s sports.

“It is not hateful to demand fairness in sports for girls,” Ponder wrote on X. When a user accused of her being a “transphobe,” Ponder responded, “call me whatever names you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is inherently unfair for biological males to compete in female sports. It’s literally the reason they were separate in the first place + the reason we needed Title IX[.]”

But that wasn’t the end of the controversy.

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour warned, “Don’t be fooled by the people who screech about ‘fairness’ to cloak their bigotry toward transgender girls and women … . This is, and always was, about hate, fear, and ignorance.”

It’s likely Ponder also received backlash from ESPN honchos for her posts. Her former colleague, Sage Steele, told Gaines her own social media posts about Thomas earned her a scolding. “I was asked to stop tweeting about it. I was asked to stop doing anything, saying anything about it on social media because I was offending others at the company,” Steele said in December, according to the New York Post.

Meanwhile, it’s not like ESPN was banning all talk about transgender participation in women’s sports. In March of 2023, the network honored Lia Thomas during a special on … Women’s History Month.

But it’s Ponder, Steele, and Gaines—not ESPN or Nancy Armour—who are expressing the view held by most Americans. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans believe that athletes should only be able to play “on teams that match birth gender.” In January, a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 66% of Americans thought transgender girls should never or rarely be allowed to play on girls’ teams.

More recently, Ponder praised Italian boxer Angela Carini, who forfeited her Paris Olympics boxing match on Aug. 1 against Algerian Imane Khelif, who seems likely to have XY chromosomes, not XX chromosomes. “Proud of this woman,” wrote Ponder of Carini. (Khelif, meanwhile, went on to win the gold medal for women’s boxing in Paris.)

Earlier this year, Ponder also defended Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who came under fire from the Left for advocating, in a commencement speech at a Catholic college, traditional values and suggesting women would find fulfillment as wives and mothers.

In an Instagram story, Ponder decried a petition to fire Butker as “unamerican.”

“Personally, I agreed with a few things he said … especially that most women are more excited/proud of their families than their day jobs,” she wrote, although Ponder also noted some areas she disagreed with Butker on.

If the bosses at ESPN were wise, they’d realize that Ponder’s views are the same as those of many of their audience members. Firing Ponder, who has been with the network since 2011, sends a clear message that genuinely feminist sports fans aren’t welcome.

Sure, the network might point to football analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who recently shared his own views about transgender athletes. Responding to the question “Do men belong in women’s sports?” Herbstreit wrote, “Of course not.” 

But while Herbstreit hasn’t been fired (yet), he’s also a man. Ponder, as ESPN executives probably realize all too well, is more compelling on this issue. “Ponder had emerged as the only female voice inside Disney since Sage Steele’s departure to speak out against ‘trans women’ (as in men) competing in women’s sports,” writes OutKick’s Bobby Burack.

So, Ponder had to go.

If ESPN was about making money, it’s unlikely the popular Ponder would be fired. But like too many companies these days, ESPN seems to be about forcing its values on all Americans, not making money. No doubt, Ponder will land at another outlet. But Americans shouldn’t forget that ESPN has effectively sided with the men who want to be in women’s locker rooms and stealing records and wins from hardworking female athletes, not the women who just want a fair shot to compete.