Episode 189: Talking All About Drafts
The 2021 NWSL Draft took place last week. But former Stanford star Catarina Macario was not among those selected. That’s because Macario opted to sign with Lyon rather than enter the NWSL. This prompted Lindsay, Jessica, and Shireen to take a closer look at drafts -- and the ways they suppress labor. Is it time for the NWSL and other U.S. sports leagues to get rid of their drafts? Of course, you’ll also hear this week’s Burn Pile and meet our latest Torchbearers. And you’ll learn what’s good in our lives, including a surprising Peloton update from Shireen...
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
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Links
Sports drafts are exploitative and would be illegal in any normal industry: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/2/5736644/sports-drafts-are-exploitative-and-would-be-illegal-in-any-normal
New NWSL 2021 college draft rule is bad for player rights: https://www.allforxi.com/2021/9/22217363/2021-nwsl-college-draft-new-rule-bad-for-player-rights
The NWSL Hits Its Latest Inflection Point: https://www.si.com/soccer/2021/01/13/nwsl-future-2021-draft-catarina-macario-europe-baird
Pros and Cons of Introducing a Draft System to the Premier League: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1722017-pros-and-cons-of-introducing-a-draft-system-to-the-premier-league/
American Jessie Diggins becomes first non-European to win Tour de Ski: https://www.olympicchannel.com/en/stories/news/detail/american-jessie-diggins-tour-de-ski-2021
In Memoriam: Kathleen Heddle https://rowingcanada.org/in-memoriam-kathleen-heddle
Transcript
Lindsay: Hi, flamethrowers. This week we wanted to dedicate our show to the memory of Thom Boykoff, a great friend of the podcast and a super fan of Wisconsin women’s basketball. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast that, oh, about 3 and a half, 4 years in, we hope you both want and need by this point. I’m Lindsay Gibbs, I’ll be your host today. Joining me today, we’ve got Jessica Luther and my favorite Shireen Ahmed in Canada. Hi, you two!
Jessica: Hi, Linz!
Shireen: Morning!
Lindsay: Alright, on this week’s show we’re gonna be talking about drafts and whether or not we should get rid of them altogether. The news peg this week is the NWSL draft, and if you wanna hear more about what happened in the NWSL draft we have a hot take between Shireen and Sandra Herrera that you must listen to. It’s phenomenal and it will get you caught up on all the happenings from a very long virtual night. But first of all, in other labor rights news this week, we had James Harden, NBA player, going to the Brooklyn Nets from the Houston Rockets, and The Onion had a headline about it. The headline was: Underachieving 31-Year-Old Now Talking About Following Dreams In Brooklyn. [laughter]
Jessica: Oh, The Onion…
Lindsay: I laughed for so long, guys, as somebody who spent most of her 20s in Brooklyn especially. So, it just got me thinking – do you two have a favorite Onion headline or just kind of parody headline in general? Because sometimes they’re the only good things in this world. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, I love The Onion, and Canada has its own version called The Beaverton. I really appreciate satire, particularly when we’re at a point when sometimes satire seems like real news and the most credible headlines.
Lindsay: Yeah. [laughs]
Shireen: So for me, I loved this question, Lindsay, and I ended up going down to find my personal favorite. For those of you who don’t know, the World Junior Hockey tournament happened not too long ago – it starts around Christmas time and goes til around early January – and we were on vacay, so you didn’t hear about it, but my favorite headline for this was, Update: Canadians realizing silver medal not worth health risk. [Lindsay laughs] So, I love this because we ended up losing to the US and it was a brutal game, you guys killed us, which is really fascinating. There was so much introspection about this because Canada had gone into the tournament and had an absolutely spotless record and then we just failed spectacularly in the finals to the Americans – which is a whole other thing.
But I loved it because there was so much kerfuffle about whether it was safer not in Canada. Arguably being a country that's trying to be proactive, like, they bubbled for this in Edmonton, and so now everyone’s coming out and the joke was people are coming out saying we really shouldn’t have allowed this, these are young boys…You did not care about the young boys back then! None of y’all cared! You just cared about the Juniors. So now retrospectively everyone’s like, well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that, the numbers are rising…Fuck you! Yeah, long live The Beaverton.
Lindsay: But if there had been a gold medal there would’ve been zero of that, is what you’re saying? Nobody would’ve cared about the health. [laughing]
Shireen: Nobody would’ve cared about the dangers to communities and community exposure! The gold, right! The gold in hockey!
Lindsay: Oh, that’s great. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so, I also love The Onion so much, but I also love Reductress, which I think is so good. I mean, I would just suggest going to their Instagram and just reading through the headlines. I had a really really hard time, as my co-hosts know, picking one headline, but this is the one that I went with: Woman Taking Break From Anxiety to Feel Guilt for No Reason. [laughter] I feel personally attacked by that headline. [laughs] Which is so true of so much of Reductress. I feel like they’re in my head making me laugh at myself. So, I just…Ugh. The Reductress gives me so much joy a lot of the time.
Lindsay: Yeah, but sometimes like you said, it can be too real. [Jessica laughs] I think it was when Jess was trying to figure out which one she was gonna do she was reading some out loud, and the one that has really kept me up at night ever since was, ‘Sorry, I’m So Bad at Texting,’ Says Friend Who Is Actually Bad at Friendship. [laughter]
Jessica: Ouch, ouch!
Lindsay: I gotta say, it’s like someone stripped me naked. That’s how I feel when you read that. It’s just like, ow, ow, ow! [laughing]
Shireen: Jess sent me one that was like so me. I think it was you, Jess, who was like, Cat Furious at You for Singing Made-Up Song About Her.
Lindsay: Alright so, as we mentioned, this week was the NWSL draft. The NWSL draft week kind of opened up with some bad news for the league when the great Catarina Macario decided to forgo the NWSL and being drafted to sign with Lyon. That kind of reignited the conversation around whether the NWSL can kind of still compete with European leagues as long as it has the draft and these up and coming players don’t have the right to pick where they wanna go. Look, I have to say I’m American, I’m very American-centric in all of my sports viewing, and it’s therefore hard for me to fathom what pro sports look like without drafts. So this week we’re just gonna kind of talk all about drafts and I’m gonna kind of be working through some of my feelings about them – knowing at the root that they are pretty anti-labor, but also just kind of having them also as this foundational point to how I view sports. So, this’ll be a little bit therapy for me. [laughs] I wanna start…Jess, can you give us a little bit of a history lesson? Why do we have drafts?
Jessica: [laughs] Yeah, why do we have drafts? I think this is such a…This is fun for me, Lindsay, because this is one of those things that I take for granted, that it just exists, and then as soon as you question it my brain explodes. So I went to look this up, I was like, why do we do this? I looked at the NFL because that’s arguably sort of the biggest spectacle of draft that we have at this point. Weren’t they gonna have it in Vegas, like on the water? They were gonna bring em in on boats and stuff? [Lindsay laughs] Then it got cancelled because of COVID. The level of spectacle with the NFL is humongous. So, I went back to look.
The NFL got started in 1920, that’s where the origins are, and it did its first draft in 1936. Before then it was just exactly what you think – players just signed with whatever team they wanted, the best players went to the best clubs, of course. So, they instituted the draft in theory to create competitive balance, since the worst teams pick first, that would then allow them in theory to secure the best players. But at this point we're now in 2021…I have to think about that now. [Lindsay laughs] We’re in 2021 – does it actually make things competitive? Is that a good enough reason to strip labor of their choice of where they get to work? The one that really gets me and I have a hard time with is are there alternatives that would make this thing balanced?
Lindsay: Yeah, so what happened before this? Shireen, you know a little bit about the NHL and what would go on before.
Shireen: Yeah, the NHL draft is actually really interesting. It wasn’t actually instituted until 1963. The draft was only instituted to try to break from the monopoly that owners had on the junior teams, and with hockey junior teams and farm teams are really really important here. What they are is they’re literally…Some people call them farm teams, and particularly in Canadian hockey you have the OHL, the WHL, and the Quebec major junior league, and from there stem farm teams. You get kids as young as 14 leaving home and billeting and playing in the juniors, and this is problematic for many reasons historically – we can get into that later – but basically what happens is previously the NHL major teams would just claim them based on their farm teams and whatnot, and that was really…It made an impact, because what it did was it took away any type of power or say from the hockey players, from the kids themselves.
I think what it is is the first entry draft, which is known as the NHL Amateur Draft, really started getting popular in 1979 when people started to shift and think about how this system should change up. Then following in the model of the NFL, which heavily influenced I think a lot of sports leagues in the United States, it became another spectacle, like, the draft is a very big deal and it crosses borders. I mean, 48% of the NHL is made up of Canadians, Canadian kids from those minors. So it’s very interesting, and the system again is quite different. I think that one of the things that really hit me is how instituted the draft is as a goal, like, to get to the big leagues, it’s a major goal and a dream for these young kids.
Lindsay: And it can be, I mean, watching the NWSL draft…I like to pretend I’m not at all sentimental or anything, you know, not a softie here. Not me! But I’m sitting here watching these players, these teenagers get drafted, and just say, “This has been my dream since I was four” – and especially in women's sports you know, the fact that they’ve been able to think about playing pro for that long is just so cool! But you know, the draft is really fun to watch because it’s a rare night in sports where every single person you’re just kind of watching their dreams come true in real time. So, as a spectacle it is pretty amazing. But does it…[laughs] Like, going back, does this competitive balance thing though, does it? Jess? [laughs] Is it helping with competitive balance?
Jessica: Yeah, I think we all know the answer. I just wanna really quickly…Shireen, you talked about farm teams in the NHL, it made me realize that no one gives a shit about the baseball draft, and we have one, but because we have farm teams there’s been a whole other way that people sort of get into baseball. It doesn’t have that same heft to it, but they still have a draft. So, I don’t know what to make of that. But as far as competitiveness, Will Leitch has a good piece in New York Magazine from 2019 – so, just remember that, because the quote is a timely one for then. He is arguing about abolishing drafts, that’s he’s for abolishing drafts, and in the piece he writes, “Bad teams are generally bad for long stretches, and good teams find ways to be good essentially every year; 19 teams have drafted first since Tom Brady and the Patriots won their first Super Bowl, and not a single one of them won a Super Bowl after making that pick.” Right? So, this doesn’t matter. The Patriots remain on top, and everyone talks all the time about Bill Belichick’s ability to bring in the players that will keep them on top. It probably helped that they had Tom Brady, as we can all see now.
Lindsay: Yeah. [laughs]
Jessica: But still, they were able to build the team that wins all the time for a long time. Leitch also pointed out that we should question funneling the best talent to the worst teams – often they're the worst teams because of poor management, or the inability to maximize the skills of their players. So, what are we doing to these really good players? The joke about Trevor Lawrence going to the Jets and, like, is that gonna just destroy his career? Because he has no choice but to go where he’s put. Then another thing that’s interesting about it is this idea of competitiveness, that the draft is a lot of the reason that people think that teams tank, right? So, we get this kind of boring, shitty play from certain teams so that they can get the first pick in the draft, and what is that doing to competitiveness within the sport?
Lindsay: I mean, in the NBA that was the whole thing with the process for Philly. Part of that process was being really bad for multiple years so that you could get high draft picks.
Jessica: Right.
Lindsay: That was an actual strategy, which seems a bit counterintuitive. I dunno! [laughs] It seems so weird. But it’s so built into the way we literally…Our plans, right? For our teams. I’m a Panthers fan, which I will probably bring up multiple times in this, in the NFL, but towards the end of the year we were not wanting the team to win anymore, right? [laughs] It was like, it’s already been a lost season, why would you want to win anymore and worsen your draft pick, right? But I guess this goes back to, Shireen, you talked a little bit on this, but I still have a really hard time grasping what do you do if you don’t have a draft? How do these teams, these leagues in Europe and elsewhere, go about this? How does that work?
Shireen: Yeah, I think this is a really great question because I grew up differently. Other than the NHL I didn’t really pay attention to American football and the like, or the NBA. So, I’ve always known of the academy systems and development systems, and I’ll use proper football and European football as the example for this, which is they have invested literally billions of dollars…Teams collectively, particularly in Europe and I’ll focus on that as they’re very much considered the epicenter of the world – Brenda would disagree, heavily, [Lindsay laughs] and say South America is – but very much they don’t have a draft, they focus on development and leagues and they literally put so much of their society and thought and education and planning into this.
You’ve got kids as young as honestly, I think, Leo Messi was 9 when he started playing with Newell’s, getting into development teams and academies is what they’re called, proper academies. It relies heavily on these people that are kind of considered scouts to find “young talent” and to foster it. Now, what about the kids that develop later? All that is not taken into consideration. It’s literally finding these gold mines. So what ends up happening is you stay with those teams and then you eventually get funneled through those systems into the team and the league that you’re at the academy with. It doesn’t mean that they don't have one-offs or there’s people that can come on what are called fresh walk-on trials. People can get invited to trials that are not part of the academy, they’re trying to figure out what they want to do.
In places like southeast Asia and central Africa and west Africa where there’s a lot of phenomenal football but they don’t have the same academies there, so teams are trying to develop academies and work with former pro players, like Gaëlle Deborah Enganamouit, who is a Cameroonian football player, she has the first academy for girls in Cameroon and she's trying to link up with Euro team leagues just to sort of expose the players that she’s got. So, it works in a different way. Swedish hockey does the same thing as soccer does – they do a development team, so it’s not only soccer that does this academy development system – I just wanted to add that point.
Also, I looked into baseball, which arguably I have no authority on, but I was just interested in the way that happens. Jess, you mentioned farm teams, but for example…Academies and leagues, the Dominican Republic have academies set up there and they have something that’s very similar, is that they have street agents which are called buscones, I think that’s the pronunciation, and they basically have people going around scouting young children and taking them and then…I don’t like the wording of this, but offering them and selling them to the academies potentially.
Jessica: Yeah, there’s a lot of problems around all this stuff. Yeah.
Shireen: None of this is great. Jess, this is part two of Loving Sports, the sequel. You know what I mean? It’s just so inherently problematic, and we haven’t even started talking about exploitation of youth here. With hockey the stipend is like $400-900 per month and they live far away from home, and there’s just so many things that are broken in this system. I mean, I know that the idea of the superpower owners in the NFL…Well, the EPL is owned by a bunch of oligarchs, it’s not as if it's this beautifully democratically run system. It’s absolutely not. It’s based on capitalism, and not almost ownership of the players as much as entitlement to the players, which I think is equally problematic.
Lindsay: All these systems are bad, right, I think is what we’re kind of coming down on. But you know, focusing in on drafts in particular, one of the ways they’re said to be able to help is to help small market teams. As a person who lives in North Carolina, you know, I don’t know if the Panthers would’ve ever gotten a Cam Newton if it hadn’t of been for the draft, you know? For getting that #1 pick. Cam Newton will probably always and forever be one of my favorite sports people and sports memories. So, what does happen with small market teams?
Jessica: So, the idea with the small market is that they just don’t have the money, so if we had an open…Which, we don’t even have that, right? I think we should say up front, there are all kinds of rules around salary caps and what teams can spend and all kinds of things that are in theory supposed to also get us to competitive balance. But the idea, I guess, is small market teams wouldn’t be able to afford a Cam Newton or wouldn’t be able to convince him to live in North Carolina. It’s interesting because Will Leitch talked about Marc Normadin’s newsletter – which, I’m not a baseball person and I’m not signed up for it so I couldn’t read it, but Will quotes Marc – and Marc says, “small-market teams are a concept that mostly exists to weaken the negotiating and earning power of the players.” This is yet another way that we convince labor that we have to have this draft in order for all of these things to work and that there are other things that we can put in place to make these places lucrative, to create a more competitive playing field.
I just think, listening to all of this, the thing about the draft is that it lessens the overall pay for players as they come in to the league. There was this piece at Vox in 2014 that really drove home this point, and it said, “the draft cartel is that it provides every team with an underpaid player or two. The fact that the very worst teams get some extra gravy is a sideshow compared to the fact that there's some gravy for each owner.” You’re right, Lindsay, like, could the Panthers have gotten Cam Newton? I don’t know. But is that a good enough reason to suppress the pay for all of these people year after year after year after year? And the point is to put money in the pockets of the owners. This goes back again to our whole discussion about ownership. Is this ever gonna work if there are people who control these teams that aren’t the players? Are player-owned teams really the only way that laborers get a fair shake in any of this?
Lindsay: Whew, yeah. Gosh, this whole conversation is just kind of making me think so much about all of this and how deeply embedded the corruption is and how much we just kind of accept it [laughs] as is in all of these sports, and look, this is something that…A huge part of this is the racial component, right? You have predominantly white owners – especially when we’re talking NFL and NBA here, I mean, all but one of the NBA owners is white, and I think there are no Black owners in the NFL. They’re trading and drafting and “owning” the contracts of players who are predominantly Black. It is very very awful when you really think about it.
But once again, the draft then becomes another tool of manipulation for owners. We talked a little bit about the James Harden trade this week between Houston and the Brooklyn Nets and all these other teams and what it came down to was a lot of draft picks, right? Draft picks are just kind of like the root of all of these transactions that we have in sports that make it more so that the owners are “owning”…There’s no difference really made in these assessments between trading a pick, right? This theoretical thing, versus a player, right? The whole thing is just…
Jessica: Lindsay, that’s interesting because when you said that that makes me think…I do think this is about money, right? That you get a bigger player, you get more people in the stands. There’s a way that this translates into just getting money, but at the same time there’s a part of me that hears what you're saying and they think they’re gonna be a better team, right? So, this is where I find it difficult because we can quote the stats on competitiveness and whether or not this actually works, but I do think these teams believe that they can do something about their competitiveness with these draft picks, right? It is complicated, and the idea that this is shit for labor…I think that’s true, and it is even difficult to make the competitiveness argument in some ways, but I also think they do genuinely believe that this will affect their ability to be good on the court or on the field, to the point where they do these huge trades…Like you said, I mean, we’re talking years out. They believe it, even if it’s also a suppression technique for keeping labor in its place.
Lindsay: Yeah. Right. Okay, so there’s just a couple of tangents here that I think are important. Number one, Shireen, when we’re talking about using them as trade picks, the NFL has also used draft picks as punishment for spygate stuff and the Tom Brady Deflategate, like, they took away draft picks from the Patriots. So, it’s like a way to punish, but also Shireen, you found this thing where they’re trying to make the league more diverse through draft incentives…?
Shireen: Yeah, this is great. I went down a couple of rabbit holes, and when we think about sports this is not necessarily, Lindsay, as you said, we just take this process for granted, that this is the way it goes. Are we really examining and interrogating what is happening? So, in this rabbit hole I found myself again at American football and the NFL, which is not really the stalwart of light and happiness and modeling anything really…So, basically what it breaks down to, this is something that was proposed recently – spring, late spring of 2020 – and according to Jim Trotter of NFL Network, there's a couple of resolutions that they had at a meeting to try…When I say “they” I mean Goodell was presenting this idea.
So, under this proposal, and I’m reading from this piece, “a team that hires a minority head coach would move up six spots in the third round of the following year’s draft. Hiring a minority for the top personnel job would create a 10-spot improvement. Ostensibly a team that hired a minority coach and G.M. would see their third-round pick improve by 16 slots in draft order.” So, that's making me think about why and when…Lindsay, you were talking about ownership – Shahid Khan is the only one, I think he owns the Jacksonville Jags, the only non-white owner. The language around all of this is gross, absolutely, but also this idea of we’ll dangle this carrot in front of you if you can just hire…I hate the language “minority,” I hate that word. I think “racialized” is a better way to do it. But again, these are the words that the NFL uses. We’re not gonna to the the NFL for proper vernacular. So, just this whole idea about, “here if you do this we’ll give you more picks…” it’s just so bizarre to me that the idea of proper inclusion of racialized folks would be used as a bargaining tool here.
Jessica: And like Lindsay said, it’s so gross. There’s something here, let me see if I can get this right…So, you’re gonna use the draft picks to incentivize people to finally hire racialized people to be in control of their teams, but the draft itself is so fucked. Then on top of that, we were doing pre-production and Martin reminded us about the combine, which made sense when it first started in 1982. The idea was like, you do have to have some kind of evaluation, right? You wanna see the players. They were flying them to all the different teams. They were like, “Hey, we should get everyone together, let’s do this in one place.” But it's now become this really gross spectacle. It was first put on television in 2004, but even until 2007 only personnel could be there.
But now fans are in the stands and they’re broadcasting on television and it feels really gross, this kind of measurement of mainly Black bodies in order to sell them to “owners.” There are lots of people who’ve made this point over and over again but when you put all of those things together, what Shireen was just talking about, what we've been talking about with what the draft is doing with labor…And then you think about how we’ve even now created this entire TV spectacle around the combine – that should sit badly with people! You should feel gross when you really put all those things together.
Lindsay: But it’s so accepted. Like Jess, I know you were listening to Jackie MacMullen on Ryen Russillo’s podcast, right? Like, talk about this with Kyrie Irving.
Jackie MacMullen: So, I will tell you this. I was thinking about all the conversations I’ve had with Kyrie through the years. One of them I had, I don't know, two years ago. We got into an argument about something, and he’s like, “Well, there shouldn’t be an NBA draft. Players should be able to go wherever they wanna go. We’re not someone’s property.” I’m like, yeah, you are, dude. That’s the way it works. That’s why you get paid all these millions.
Jessica: Oof.
Lindsay: Ew! [grossed out noises]
Jessica: That’s really hard to listen to. Ew. I mean, it’s not why they get paid all the millions because they’re someone’s “property,” they get paid all the millions because people pay millions of dollars to watch them do superhuman things that are fun and amazing. It’s hard to think about a white woman saying this to a Black man who’s the laborer and who’s making a case for himself and for his colleagues. It stings too, because we all know that there’s a kernel of truth in what she’s saying – not the part about the millions, but like, “sorry dude, this is just how the system works.” There’s a kernel of truth to that because like you said, Lindsay, we all are kind of just like, “this is just how things go!” It makes my skin crawl, though, listening to it. I just can’t even imagine…We don’t know really what the conversation with Kyrie was like, right? This is her interpretation of it years later. But it’s a bummer. Jackie MacMullen is…I like her, but shit. What do you do with that? It’s hard to think about someone in the media, that that is how they themselves accept the system, as we know that they’re the ones reporting on it…Man.
Lindsay: Right, and players can be entitled assholes at times, right? We all know that. [laughs] That’s just part of it, right? Players in men’s leagues, women’s leagues, white, Black – all of these players can be entitled assholes at times and treat fans poorly or their teammates poorly, but that’s just part of it, right? That’s kind of part of it, and that doesn’t mean they’re property, right? Or that they’re out of line. They’re not property. Owners own the contracts, not the people.
Jessica: Right, right. But then even the way the fans imagine these players is often as their property, right? Like, people are really mad at Kyrie right now for not wanting to play basketball, as if they’re entitled to watching him play. We saw that all this summer with the wildcat strikes and all of those things. It’s just gross. In these moments, when you hear Jackie MacMullen say it and you’re like, “Ugh, god! I can’t even imagine saying that to Kyrie,” but also this is true that people think that that is true, and that’s what’s fucked up.
Shireen: These ideas of loyalty, that plays into it. This is a business. That’s why we’re so moved, and I’m invigorated by labor solidarity movements within sports leagues because there’s a protection, and sure, the players can be “assholes” but it’s their bodies that are being used.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Shireen: I’m a big advocate for players being way more assholes than owners or everyone else. The conversations I have with my 16 year old, he’s like, “James Harden snaked the team, he shouldn’t have done that.” I’m like, James Harden doesn’t owe anybody shit! James Harden can do what he wants and as far as I’m concerned open up a bistro in Brooklyn, like, do it to the max! Be the extra! Do you! Because I just don't ever think – and maybe I’m wrong about this – that athletes will ever be recognized or compensated fully in the way they deserve, not while there’s an ownership system or draft system like this to begin with.
Jessica: Right. The system exists exactly for that, Shireen, to make sure they don’t get paid what they actually deserve. That’s why it all exists the way it does.
Lindsay: That’s it, right? That’s ultimately it. I do wanna quickly bring us back around. I think I could talk about this for ten more episodes, but to where we started: the NWSL. I think of all the leagues that we have in the United States right now, the NWSL is the most suited to be pressured to get rid of the draft. It does have to compete with foreign leagues for players during the same season. These players want to go abroad where they can potentially earn more money and have more decision power over where they’re signing and the WNBA, since it’s on a different season than most of the overseas teams, it doesn’t have quite that same pressure yet. Then the NBA and NFL, you’re gonna make more money ultimately, bottom line, than if you go overseas usually. So, the best players still have financial incentives to deal with the draft system and deal with all of that. But what would the NWSL look like if it got rid of the draft? What do we see there? What does the MLS do, Jess?
Jessica: The MLS…This is like the most ridiculous draft ever. It’s so funny because men’s soccer is such a powerhouse around the world all over the place, so the idea that the one place they do a draft is in the US, it’s just failing over and over again. It doesn’t really have a point. So, there was a goal.com article last year that had this amazing stat in it – stick with me here! – it said, “Of the 24 players selected in the first round of 2019 draft, just nine made at least five MLS appearances. The top five picks of the 2018 draft, meanwhile, have made just 74 career appearances between them.” So, the “best players” going in the MLS draft, that’s not even true, right? They’re just signing on the best players. The best players in the MLS are signed on on contracts. It just doesn’t make any sense in a global sport, especially men’s soccer, to have this weird archaic US-centered thing. It’s clearly not working. They should just not have one.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s like, either the NWSL draft ends up going kind of that way of being completely irrelevant, or we get rid of it altogether, which…Shireen, by looking at overseas, what do you think that would look like?
Shireen: I mean, what it looks like in other places I don’t know because the American system is so built around this idea of draft. It’s performative, it’s theatrical, it’s so embedded in. How do we keep this house standing if we take away one of the pillars? I mean, that’s just how it is, and I hate that, this conversation of, “that’s just how it is.” I don’t think that’s critical. We need to start coming up with ideas and whether it’s organizational unionizing, organizational movement, labor solidarity, there’s a lot of advocacy that needs to happen, particularly for racialized players and marginalized players. We need to have people show up for queer players because there’s so few if any in the NHL or NFL. All of this to me all come back to how much money…But whatever system we use we have to keep in mind owners get money. It’s not as if in non-draft systems the owners don’t get money. So really it’s like the entire thing is bullshit.
Jessica: We should just burn it all down? Is that what you’re saying, Shireen Ahmed?
Shireen: Literally getting to that! [Jessica laughs] Burn the whole thing down.
Lindsay: Burn. [laughter] Alright, we could go on and on and on but I’m gonna pivot us here because we do have an actual burn pile to get to. But first I wanna look ahead at our interview which is coming out on Thursday. In the interview Shireen chats with Chanel Keenan about her hockey ambassadorship, fandom, and her hopes for a better hockey community, and there might be a mention of the Kraken!
Chanel: So, when I got the title confirmation I myself was like, “Intersectionality consultant? What does that even entail?” To me it means so many different things, but the biggest thing that I take away from it is just being a disabled body in this space, period. Add on that I’m a woman, add on the fact that I’m a woman of color. All these things that…You know, the title means whatever it means to whoever made it up for me, basically, but to me it’s just being such a different person in this space. Luckily with the Kraken I’ll look at my screen and I will see somebody that looks like me – maybe not the disabled part, but I’ll see another woman, I’ll see another Asian woman there, and I’ll be like, okay, I don’t feel so small, you know? I think that that’s so important.
Lindsay: Alright – Jess, wanna get us started with the burn pile?
Jessica: Sure. So, this week the Jacksonville Jaguars announced they were hiring – twice-retired for health reasons, so he says – former college football coach Urban Meyer to be their head coach. There’s plenty to say about Meyer’s time as a head coach in college ball. His most lucrative and high-profile stints were at Florida, where he won two national championships, and Ohio State where he won an additional national championship. Meyer, while at UF, retired from coaching in December 2009 saying he had a medical scare. He returned mere months later but then left Florida in December of 2010 saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also happened to have had his worst year at Florida. During his six years at UF, Meyer’s players were arrested more than 30 times.
I think in particular there will always be questions about Aaron Hernandez’s time in Gainesville. There were also issues with his coaching staff at UF that carried through to Ohio State. In August 2018 Ohio State put Meyer on administrative leave as it investigated whether he knew that the wife of his assistant coach, Zach Smith, had reported Smith for domestic abuse. Turns out, he did know. And it turns out in 2009, while Smith was Meyer’s assistant coach in Florida, Smith was arrested for throwing his pregnant wife into a wall. As everything came to light publicly about Smith in 2018, Meyer lied about what he knew and when he knew it. He was ultimately suspended for three whole games by the school, and eventually retired again at the end of the 2018 season, again saying it was for health reasons. Now, because he can win football games and despite all that other stuff I just laid out, he’s a head coach again, failing up the professional ranks. Cool. Cooooool.
The announcement of Meyer’s hiring came with an additional sting: literally the day that Jacksonville announced that they hired Meyer, USA Today’s Nancy Armour, Mike Freeman and Tom Schad published a piece looking at how each NFL team does hiring Black and brown head coaches and general managers. Four teams – FOUR TEAMS! – the Cardinals, Browns, Braves, Buccaneers, are responsible for a THIRD of the hiring of Black coaches and GMs over the last 30 years. Four teams, a third of them. The Jaguars, on the other hand, are on the disgraceful list of teams that have never had a person of color as either their head coach or general manager. That list also includes the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Rams, New England Patriots, New Orleans Saints, and the Tennessee Titans.
When the Jags went out to find a head coach they found the very white Urban Meyer who has an at best questionable past when it comes to making choices for the good of his players or his community. What a fucking bummer all around. I just want to burn this predictable and predictably disappointing shit. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Shireen?
Shireen: Again, WE’RE IN A PANDEMIC, OKAY? Something something college football, yay…American college football. Somebody won something, it was a big deal. Apparently Alabama won this big thing and Nick Saban won his seventh championship, yada yada yada. I’m just gonna read you a little bit of Shannon Ryan’s piece from the Tribune, and before I even do that I want you to imagine this: I want you to imagine seas of people, shoulder to shoulder in celebration, unmasked, celebrating joyously. Now, think about that with a deadly virus which is happening. So, that’s basically what resulted from this Alabama…And congratulations to everybody in Alabama, I’m so happy for you that you’re happy, but I’m also very happy if you’d stay in your house and party there, which is absolutely necessary right now.
So, this is from Shannon Ryan’s piece: “But if we’re going to celebrate the College Football Playoff championship game, we can’t forget what’s been left in the wake of the 2020 season. More than 100 games were canceled because of COVID-19 protocols. Hundreds of players, coaches and staff members were infected with a virus that has unknown long-term effects. Contact tracing beyond the football world is limited and under resourced, leaving questions about how infected players could potentially spread the virus outside their locker rooms or how sports inspired unsafe get-togethers for viewing parties. Epidemiologists must have cringed watching videos of fans flooding the Tuscaloosa streets to celebrate Alabama’s victory. I’d imagine most who lost a loved one to COVID-19 were furious or hurt by that scene.
The United States has averaged about 247,200 COVID-19 cases a day over the last week, which was an all-time high, and more than 376,000 Americans have died so far. Yet college football continued to muddy the public health messaging on Monday night — a consistency throughout the season. No, not by playing, but by the oversimplified lazy cliches by analysts.” So, all of this that she so perfectly said, everything about this was problematic: the danger to the public, the oversimplification…We know that COVID is disproportionately affecting racialized communities, and I hate all of it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: On that, I’ll go. I was gonna burn Klete Keller, the US Olympian who was part of the insurrection in the capitol, who was a swimmer, who was discovered because he wore a US Olympic team jacket to the insurrection, which is just mind-boggling, and I of course am burning that, but I had to change at the last minute here. On Friday night Karl-Anthony Towns, a player for the Minnesota Timberwolves, released a note saying that he had tested positive for COVID and that he was gonna immediately isolate and follow every protocol. This was especially gut-wrenching because Towns lost his mother to COVID at the beginning of the pandemic and has been open about having a hard time returning to the court, caring about basketball at all, doing any of this, right? The fact that we're doing any of this.
His letter or statement announcing this said, “It breaks my heart that my family, and particularly my father and sister continue to suffer from the anxiety that comes along with this diagnosis as we know all too well what the end result could be. To my niece and nephew...I promise you I will not end up in a box next to grandma and I will beat this.” Meanwhile the NBA continues to play on. I don't know what we're doing here. I just don’t know. I don’t know how the NBA or any indoor sports, basketball on the collegiate level, the pro level, anything, is continuing to do this. Everything needs to stop, and it needs to stop yesterday. I do not give a shit about your television contract. I do not give a shit about players’ legacies and what fans wanna see right now. Somebody needs to be the adult in the room and stop this madness.
It’s inconceivable what Towns is going through, it’s inconceivable that a season continues, that an NBA continues, that it’s not even just pausing for this. It’s even more inconceivable that people like Charles Barkley are going on national television and saying that NBA and NFL players should get to the front of the vaccine line because they pay more taxes! All of this is just…All the ways that the United States has handled COVID is the most embarrassing and devastating things I think in the history…And it sucks that we’re here, but these individual leagues or conferences need to step up. I’m talking about player welfare. You cannot say you give a shit about safety and at the same time read a note like Karl-Anthony Towns and then continue your season without adjustment.
I just wanna burn the fact that people act like sports and athletes are tougher than a pandemic, and that a pandemic is something you can out-muscle or out-shine or be distracted from. Karl-Anthony, you’re in our thoughts and prayers, you and your entire family, and anyone who has lost someone to COVID. For all of those trying to pretend like this isn’t happening: burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, it is time to actually talk about some positives and lift up the torchbearers of the week. But first, before we celebrate these incredible people, the Burn It All Down team wants to offer our sincerest condolences to the entire rowing community, especially the family of 3x gold medalist Canadian oarswoman Kathleen Heddle. Heddle died last week after a six year battle with cancer. Also want to send our love to the family and friends of Tom Perrotta, the Wall Street Journal writer and reporter who mainly covered tennis and was just a great friend to tennis, especially women’s tennis and the entire tennis community. He passed away due to brain cancer, and we’re thinking about all of you and so appreciative of the work that Tom did. Alright, for our torchbearers, Shireen, who is our rink leader of the week?
Shireen: Rink leader of the week is 34-year-old Hayley Moore, who is currently the general manager of the NWHL’s Boston Pride. She has been hired as the vice president of hockey operations for the AHL, making her one of the highest-ranking female hockey executives in North America.
Lindsay: Love it. Our wizard of the Week is Amber Nichols, who became the NBA G League’s second female general manager because the Washington Wizards named her the GM of their G League team, the Capital City Go-Go. Congratulations Amber! Jess, who is our Snow Warrior of the Week?
Jessica: Jesse Diggins became the first non-European to win cross-country skiing's Tour de Ski title. The Tour de Ski is an annual series of eight World Cup races in ten days. After she finished the final event, where she took second but first across the combined events, she tried to raise her arms before she fell face-first into the snow. Congratulations to Jessie Diggins!
Lindsay: Shireen! I love being able to give this one to you. Who is our American Football Hero of the Week? [laughs]
Shireen: Yes, as I am the American football wizard! American Football Hero of the Week is going to Robert Saleh who was named the new head coach of the New York Jets, making him the first Muslim head coach in the NFL, ever.
Lindsay: Love that. Can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer of the week – oh, I’m so excited about this one! – is dear friend and guest of the show Nicole Auerbach. She is a college football reporter for The Athletic, and she was named the national sportswriter of the year by the National Sports Media Association. Get this: at 31 years old she is the youngest writer to win the award in the organization’s 61-year history, and the FIRST WOMAN to ever win it!
Shireen: Yeah, it’s amazing.
Jessica: What!?
Lindsay: Wow!
Shireen: Congrats, Nicole! We love you.
Jessica: Yay!
Lindsay: We love you so much. Nicole, your reporting has always been cherished here at Burn It All Down, and especially the work you did this year on COVID, but it’s so great to see you get the recognition that you deserve on a national scale. Yeah, it’s just incredible. Alright, on that note, what’s good? Shireen.
Shireen: Guess what, friends!? IT’S MY BIRTHDAY WEEK! [laughter]
Jessica: She's still wearing her party tiara, in case you were listening last week. She’s still wearing it.
Shireen: I love it. I’m wondering, to get a more intensely bejeweled crown…I think I will. I’ve instructed my children what I want, I want them to perform a rousing lip synch performance to a Stan Rogers song. So, I think we will. That’s what I want. I got a beautiful calendar from friend of the show, my dear Courtney Szto, and close friend Dr. Shobhana Xavier. They’re professors at Queens University, and it’s like our faces for every month of the year, and it is so much fun. [Lindsay laughs] I also wanted to keep this one on the down low, but now I will disclose: I have joined Peloton, and I download the app, and – look at Lindsay’s face! I have been supported immensely through this time–
Lindsay: Look at Martin’s! [laughing]
Shireen: – and I’m having a great time. I’ve been doing stretching, I’m listening to sleep meditation, I’m doing yoga with Chelsea. It is hard, and yoga’s not actually something I’ve ever done because I was always exposed to it from white women doing yoga and something about goats, like, I can’t be in this space. But having racialized women do yoga is a really beautiful thing for me, and really empowering, and like I said it's really hard. So, I need that, I missed soccer. I feel like I’m gonna cry every time I talk about this. I haven’t played soccer in almost 10 months and that really hurts, it's really hard for me. It’s the longest I think without a hijab ban that I've ever been away from the field, even that includes being pregnant. Like, I used to nurse on the sidelines. It’s really not easy.
So, Peloton is lovely. There are hashtags for everything and so I’m kind of into that. My name if you’re on Peloton is Shireeny, and Amira’s been very wonderful and supportive. She’s over the moon. It’s been a lot of fun. This is what I need, I need to take ownership in this year, I need to take ownership in different ways and maybe try new sports things and working out in front of a TV was never my preferred method, but we are where we are and I’m going to try this.
Lindsay: Amazing. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so obviously what’s good is Shireen’s birthday. [laughter] I just wanted to spend this time to give a shoutout to electric blankets and heating pads. [laughs] That’s what’s good for me right now. It’s cold enough at night that having an electric blanket is great, and I know that this is not just me – lots of people are having weird body reactions to just the level of stress and fear that people are feeling in this moment, but I definitely had this weird under my shoulder blade kind of thing and it was pulling on my neck and the only thing that was helping was sitting on a heating pad. I was just really happy to have this artificial form of heat production that I could just apply directly to my back. It took about four days for me to really work through that. So, that was definitely what was good for me this week.
Lindsay: Amazing. What’s good…I’ve been getting out for walks, even in the cold, with Moe. I went on a good walk with my aunt yesterday and it ended up snowing in the middle of our walk out of nowhere, and it was kind of nice because we never would have planned this if we thought it was going to snow, we wouldn’t have gone, but it ended up being really beautiful and so that's been good. You’ll all be listening to this on Tuesday, or this comes out on Tuesday; we’re recording this on Sunday, and this week I’m terrified for what might happen this week in the United States, especially in DC, which most of you know I lived in until just like two months ago. DC is a militarized state right now, and I’m so scared for everyone.
At the same time I am hopeful this week will also be a new beginning for if we can get through it safely, and for sure a reason to celebrate, and I’m trying to focus on that right now, because January 20th, 2021 has long been a day I think many of us have circled in our calendars as hopefully a day of hope and a day of what’s good, if everyone can be safe, which of course is a big if. Then, you know, it’s weird to say it's something I’m looking forward to but it’s also I feel like hopefully gonna be the end of an ugly chapter, and we know that healing doesn’t begin overnight. We know that we have a long long long long way to go! I don’t wanna act like we’re gonna wake up Thursday morning and, you know, everything’s gonna be fine, but at the same time I think hopefully we will all be able to exhale and that's what’s good.
Alright friends, thank you all so much for listening to this episode of Burn It All Down. If you wanna give us a rating and review that’s a really, that’s a really nice thing you could do for us right now, over on Apple Podcasts. It means so much an it really helps us continue to grow our podcast. We’re also over on Patreon, patreon.com/burnitalldown, where for as little as $2/month you can get access to some extra segments and some special behind the scenes features. On all social media platforms, we're on Twitter, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Insta and we have our website, burnitalldownpod.com. As Brenda always says: burn on, and not out. And take care of yourselves this week, friends.