People Have Got To Try Being Normal About Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, and the WNBA

Plus: Congress struggling to regulate college sports, looking at the economics of World Cup hosts, and why are golf shows all the same?

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Kick off your shoes and get comfy this week, it could be a wild ride.

We've got a wide-ranging newsletter today, touching on the WNBA drama, the latest news from Congress on the college sports bill, a look back at the economics of the World Cup, and we close with a review of a new golf show. Fore!

Locker Room Links

• Stanford's football team is attempting to unionize—possibly very early steps toward a collective bargaining agreement for college sports.
• Former NFL kicker Jay Feely is running for Congress in Arizona, and won the Republican primary last week. His Democrat opponent is Amish Shah—who was team doctor when Feely was on the New York Jets.
• Should sports stadiums and arenas be in downtowns, or far-off suburbs? Friend of Reason M. Nolan Gray, a city planner, has interesting thoughts—his answer depends on which sport the venue is for.
• New research shows that when the NBA changed their rule so last-second heaves no longer count as missed field goals, players shooting it at the buzzer went from happening 58 percent of the time to 94 percent of the time.
• One story makes a pretty strong case against the NFL's Rooney Rule, which I've written about here.
• Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.), who is definitely not a hack, wants FIFA President Gianni Infantino to appear before the House Judiciary Committee so Raskin can yell at him about FIFA's relationship with President Donald Trump.
• Elsewhere in Reason: "The Peptide Gray Market Is Already Here. The FDA Is Just Catching Up."
• THIS.
  

  NASCAR races aren't too long, the cautions are. pic.twitter.com/pHusDjOXZ1

  — Daniel Céspedes (@_DanielCespedes) July 24, 2026

Be Normal About the WNBA

All publicity is good publicity, right? The WNBA received a lot of publicity last week—but most of it had nothing to do with the league's All-Star Game.

The biggest furor was over USA Today columnist Nancy Armour's piece complaining about Caitlin Clark's flopping. This was not a normal "National Sports Star Is Actually a Flopper" contrarian take. Armour claimed Clark's "histrionics…are putting other people in danger" off the court. "It seems there is a white nationalist faction to Clark's fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic," Armour wrote. Then came the inartful paragraph, invoking the lynching of Emmett Till, that you have to read to believe:

DEFINITELY was not expecting this paragraph in the story based on this tweet about Caitlin Clark and foul/non-foul calls. https://t.co/O4JiMH5NdR pic.twitter.com/dYax9fHYXg

— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) July 23, 2026

Even sports journalists who I assume are typical run-of-the-mill liberals were calling out how weird and bad this writing was.

You'd think the backlash would have USA Today on high alert to get everything Clark-related right, but two days later they messed up. Clark had skipped a WNBA event to get her hair done, they said—before clarifying that Clark was attending a charity dinner in Iowa for her foundation.

The league's players union made an odd choice last week, too. The viral Sophie Cunningham pointing incident happened back in June, but the union just decided that brands should not monetize the incident. People will still make money off of it, but not the league's players, as some people pointed out. 

Cunningham also made news by saying it's "common sense" to keep transgender athletes out of women's sports, one of several reasons why people think she's a "MAGA Barbie." (Cunningham told ESPN she's actually "very much in the middle….But people love to assume." She's not going to be vice president, guys.)

All of this is to say that, especially for a league that's trying to sell itself as a viable entertainment offering, there aren't enough people talking about the actual product: basketball games.

Maybe it's the league, players, fans, or journalists who are to blame for this—I'm not sure. But other women's sports leagues don't seem to experience the same phenomena.

Nothing Gets by Congress

Remember the Protect College Sports Act, the bipartisan Senate bill to "save" the NCAA and overhaul college sports? It's not dead, but it's not in great shape either.

The bill will not get a Senate vote before the monthlong August recess, Yahoo's Ross Dellenger reports. But the leaders of the bill, Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.), are still trying to get the Big Ten and SEC behind it. This seems like it has long odds because of an undeniable tension—the whole point of "saving" the NCAA is to put schools on more equal footing, but the Big Ten and the SEC want to maintain their competitive advantage (this is explicitly what some school leaders have said).

If the Big Ten and SEC won't get behind the bill, many Republicans won't get behind it either. And if amendments move the bill far enough that those conferences do get on board, then Democrats might jump off the train and doom the bill.

If I had to put on my Brendan Sorsby hat and bet on it, I don't think any significant college sports legislation is getting through Congress this year. But when Congress comes back after Election Day for the lame-duck session, you never know who might flip on what issues. If legislation is going to pass, it's most likely to happen then—right in the most intense part of college football season.

In the meantime, Trump's executive order to save college sports, signed back in April, takes effect on August 1. It restricts eligibility windows, transfers, and state laws, but various lawsuits are already underway challenging similar policies.

The Cities That Turned the World Cup Away

This is a pro-World Cup newsletter. But it is not a pro-World Cup subsidies newsletter. While the world looks back at a great World Cup, let's look at the cities that chose to tell the World Cup no.

It's a short list, and the most notable of them is Chicago, the third-largest metro area of the country that has a stadium perfectly capable of hosting a World Cup soccer match (days before the World Cup began, it hosted Germany against the U.S. in a friendly exhibition match).

Will the cities that hosted World Cup matches, and often spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on security and other costs, see a long-term benefit? The argument was that these cities would not just see an influx of visitors on gameday, but would be put on a global stage and be seen as a world-class city that everyone around the world should visit.

Here's an oversimplified way of looking at the results. Did the cities that hosted World Cup matches see a surge in Google searches, while the cities that didn't stayed flat or declined? Because surely someone from Ecuador (with a nominal per capita GDP of $7,575) watched their team's match against Curaçao in Kansas City, then thought "Hey, let's go take a trip to Kansas City one day, just for fun."

No such surge in interest exists. Compare host cities Kansas City and Boston with nonhosts Chicago and Minneapolis, as I did here with a pretty graph for example, and you'll see that search interest in all four cities over the last three months (before, during, and after the World Cup) was roughly the same throughout.

Two things to remember: Oftentimes sports-related tourism replaces other tourism in the same city (basically by displacing those who would have come but instead want to avoid the crowds) and host cities may actually see a tourism hangover (perhaps from people saying "I just went to [host city], I don't need to go there again already.").

A small tourism boost might be better than nothing, but not if it costs taxpayers $250 million, as it did in Kansas City—that's a lot for a city whose annual budget is roughly $2.5 billion.

In Chicago, Minneapolis, and Montreal, the politicians saw the same thing: There was too much uncertainty about what, and how much, FIFA was asking for.

The point is not that the U.S. shouldn't host the World Cup ever again—it should! But cities and host committees should be smart about avoiding deals that are excessively favorable toward FIFA. Just because the World Cup is fun does not mean cities should give FIFA special treatment or taxpayer dollars. Hosting the World Cup is not going to fix your city's budget, create long-term economic prosperity, or put your city "on the map."

Every Golf Movie or Show Is the Same Now

I watched the new Netflix show The Hawk starring Will Ferrell and came to the following conclusion: Basically every fictional TV show or movie about golf that's come out in the last 30 years is the same. So let's talk about Happy Gilmore, Happy Gilmore 2, The Hawk, and Stick.

The main character is a guy who is down on his luck and needs some money (this happens in all of the above). He is past his prime, age-wise (all of the above except the original Happy Gilmore). He's kind of quirky and funny and either has a funny older, wise male caddy/mentor, or the old, wise man dies (all of the above). He gets a new caddy to fill in who knows nothing about golf (all of the above, and in Stick and Hawk the new caddies are women). He's divorced but his wife is still wealthy, and he wants to get back together (Stick and Hawk, plus in Happy Gilmore 2 he's widowed). The main character's biggest enemy is snooty or a jerk, but probably both (all of the above). Not the title character, but one of the main male characters has daddy issues (Stick and Hawk). Intergenerational differences are used for comedic material (I think all of the above except the first Happy Gilmore). Also, the Wilson brothers are involved somehow (Stick and Hawk, but surprisingly neither of the Gilmore movies). Lastly, the main character needs to win a golf tournament to redeem himself.

I would rank these for you, but as you can see they're too similar. Stick at least flips the script a bit by having Owen Wilson play a former golfer who becomes coach to a young prodigy, but the dynamics are still largely the same.

Hawk is more slapstick and weird than Stick, but still not hilarious or well-written enough to make you guffaw. Fortune Feimster carries the first several episodes as the novice caddy. The plot picks up in the last few episodes with more interesting developments than I was expecting. But it's still not a great show. I can basically only recommend if you're really into golf and don't have anything else to watch right now.

Golf is a weird and crazy sport. The writers need to get more creative! Real-world golfers have given them plenty of fodder.

Replay of the Week

To the soccer haters, thank you for putting up with several weeks of soccer replays. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming: Yankees players who have no idea how to play defense. They lost this game on Sunday 11–6, and it almost happened again on Monday night.

Alec Bohm clears the bases as the Phillies keep piling onto their lead.

📺 Sunday Night Baseball on NBC & Peacock pic.twitter.com/QEXZ9qOjmw

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) July 27, 2026

Volpe throws one away pic.twitter.com/FiXZ7Ycv73

— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) July 27, 2026

 

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the week, the PGA Tour's Rocket Classic tournament in Detroit, Thursday–Sunday on ESPN+, Golf Channel, and CBS.