Episode 204: Into the Matrix: New Tech Frontiers in Sport
Jessica, Amira and Lindsay start the show with musings on the NFL draft. Then they dive head first into new technologies in sport: from WTF are NFTs to wearable stat trackers from DarkHorse (maybe) closing recruitment gaps to Metrica Sports' making cutting edge analytics more accessible to women's sport. They wade through the tech gobbledygook to discuss the good, bad and confusing of these new technologies. Next, they burn the awful things in sport of the week. Then they celebrate the Torchbearers bringing light, including Deepika Kumari who won team and recurve individual gold medals at the Guatamala Archery World Championship representing India. Following that, they tease this week's interview with wrestling critic Scarlett Harris, share what's good in their lives and what they're watching in sports this week. And lastly, Amira announces their new merch shop on Bonfire: bonfire.com/store/burn-it-all-down
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
Trevor Lawrence and all the other athletes getting paid in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency: https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/nfl-draft-trevor-lawrence-cryptocurrency-bitcoin
The rise of analytics in women’s football: https://theathletic.com/2547245/2021/04/28/the-rise-of-analytics-in-womens-football/
Wyoming’s New Online Sports Betting Law OKs Crypto Wagers: https://www.coindesk.com/wyoming-accepts-crypto-bets-sports-gambling
Silicon Valley Sports Tech Company Aims To Level Playing Field: https://patch.com/california/redwoodcity-woodside/silicon-valley-sports-tech-company-aims-level-playing-field
Jude Hamer: 'A professional women’s wheelchair basketball league only ever seemed like a pipe dream' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/paralympic-sport/2021/04/26/jude-hamera-professional-womens-wheelchair-basketball-league/
Sonia Bompastor replaces Jean-Luc Vasseur as Lyon coach: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/56901956
Viktoria Listunova wins first European gymnastics all-around title: https://olympics.com/en/news/viktoria-listunova-wins-first-european-gymnastics-all-around-title
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica. And on this week's show, I'm joined by Amira and Lindsay. Today we're going to talk about some new technology in sports, including NFTs, which..What are those? We may find out, or not. Then we'll burn things that deserve to be burned, highlight the torchbearers who are giving us hope during this time, let you know what's good in our worlds, and tell you what we're watching this week. Let's start this week though, with the NFL draft, which began on Thursday with the first round. I think it's over? I actually have no idea.
Amira: Maybe. I don't know. It's very long. [laughs]
Lindsay: It is so long.
Jessica: Yeah. Amira, do you have thoughts?
Amira: Yeah, mostly that it’s really fucking long.
Jessica: Is it still seven rounds?
Amira: First of all, it is a lot of rounds, but also they draw it out. And this was the first thing that I noticed about the draft, because we've been in recent years, this year and last year, talking about how little time the WNBA draft gets relative to that, and I think that maybe for me we've been thinking about it wrong. Like, actually the WNBA is a model we should follow, [Jessica laughs] but we don't actually need it to be this long. I was not planning on watching the draft at all – I actually kind of forgot that you watched it to care about what your team gets. That just didn’t pop into my mind. I mostly wanted to see my student Micah Parsons get drafted. I know he was going in the first round and pretty high. So I was like, it starts at eight. I will be out of there by like 8:45!
Jessica: I know. It was like till midnight, wasn't it?
Amira: Oh, I mean, I think he got drafted at like 9:40-something.
Jessica: Where did he go?
Amira: He went to the Cowboys, and it’s very exciting. He is a Harrisburg native, but his family is Cowboys fans. And mostly I was really thrilled for him, him and his teammate, Jesse, who will be in the draft next year. I had them as freshmen together and they are really cute as like their friendship goals. And so most of it was watching Jesse there. Jesse went with him and was like holding his son all night and stuff like that. So it was like watching…They just looked grown. I mean, they've always been grown, but I can't believe that they're done already and they're going, and I'm always happy when people survive exploitative systems and can get a little bit of a payday or a lot of a payday. So it was thrilling to watch that happen. And I'm really happy for Micah and for his entire family and for his sweet little son. And I stayed up until that point and then I cheered and then I turned it off.
Jessica: You were out. [laughs]
Amira: So, I'm done. [laughs]
Jessica: Part of it, for me, I’ll admit I don't really watch college football these days so I barely knew anything about these guys. And I have to say Zach Wilson who played QB for and looks like he played QB for Brigham Young. He went second in the draft, the New York Jets. And I looked this up – Wikipedia tells me that he is 21, and he's definitely like maybe 15.
Lindsay: Oh my. [laughter]
Jessica: Like, he is a child. And I was like, how is this a real NFL player? But apparently he is a real person. So, that was news to me. Lindsay, how did your Panthers do?
Lindsay: First I want to say, like, he was great for memes. He was the meme star, I think, because it was just like, he looked like he was a member of a boy band.
Jessica: He looks like a boy band member, yes.
Lindsay: Yeah. He just looked so out of place and every single thing that he was doing. So I wasn't paying attention to the draft this year. Look, I'm not giving up the Panthers. I've realized I can't fully give them up, but I'm not quite as invested in the year, but James Dator, who is a writer for SB Nation and a big Panthers fan on Twitter, said the Panthers did good. So, that's good. But also when I was scrolling James's timeline, I saw him retweet something from Tom Pelissero that says, “The Falcons are signing former South Dakota School of the Mines tackle Jack Batho IV.” South Dakota School of Mines! I did not know that that was like a big college football school! [laughs]
Jessica: They have a team?
Lindsay: That was a place. They apparently have a team and you can get drafted the NFL. But the South Dakota School of the Mines!
Amira: Our producer Tressa is informing us that she grew up near there.
Lindsay: Oh my god! [laughter] That's amazing. And also of course his name is Jack Batho IV. Jack Batho IV. And I know you're wondering, yes, he is very white. [laughs]
Jessica: Sounds like an evangelical preacher's son or something.
Lindsay: Oh, it's just that's my impression right now. I'm just probably going to be thinking about South Dakota School of the Mines a disproportionate amount over the next week or so. Yeah. [laughs]
Amira: Well, I have to say, so much about it was also random. First of all, it looked like a massive super spreader event. It was like a concert, and they had random bands, and then Goodell did this thing where he was inviting people to give picks, like to come up on stage, but not necessarily to give them, but to like sit in the chair…
Jessica: It was the chair from last year. Yeah. I only heard about this.
Amira: Yeah! And it was like, I mean, I don't know, flamethrowers, if any of you were like the one thing that would really be icing on the cake of being there is to sit in Goodell's chair? Like, is that a prize for people? I don't really…Maybe not for any of our listeners. So, I found it random. I do have to stay on the subject of names, the one thing that really did warm my heart: another Penn State player who was drafted is Jayson Oweh, but as soon as he got into the league he corrected reporters and he said, “Look, Jayson is my middle name. My first name is Odafe and I'm Nigerian and people had trouble pronouncing it. So I went with Jayson in my earlier years, but I don't care anymore. You're going to have to learn how to pronounce it.” So I wanted to say a hearty congratulations and welcome to the league to Odofe Oweh of the Baltimore Ravens.
Jessica: Lovely.
Lindsay: Woo! We love it. Sorry, I just…I’m back on the thread of the South Dakota School of the Mines. I just want to share a couple of my favorite quotes in the thread. First someone said, “mines or mimes? because it would be great if it was school of the mimes.” And then other people are saying, “just imagine a mime, a left tackle, creating invisible walls to block edge rushers.” So, I will be thinking about that forever. And then another person said, “Hey, I went to school there. It is the South Dakota School of the Mines and Technology. It's an engineering school. We refer to ourselves as the MIT of the Midwest.” [laughs]
Jessica: Oh, good know. They probably got a real smart player.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Amira: Now, of course, all I need to know is what their mascot is and if it goes on the list of our tremendous mascot threads, because–
Jessica: Tressa just told us that they are the hard rockers, like rocks, mining, like mining rocks, hard rockers.
Lindsay: [laughs] The hard rockers! Like rocks, mining!
Jessica: Okay. I'm obsessed with the school now, Linz, this is your fault.
Lindsay: I'm sorry. Blame James for retweeting this because I had missed this and I really just wanted to be able to say something about the Panthers. I think we might have to do like, just a full podcast on this now.
Jessica: Flamethrowers, if you are alumni, please let us know. We'd love to hear all about it. I do want to say, I have two things. First: my favorite story that came out of the draft was Alabama running back Najee Harris hours before he was drafted 24th overall in the first round by the Steelers, he hosted a draft party at the homeless shelter where he used to live in Richmond, California. He provided food for everyone in attendance. He's also a big Rapinoe fan and the back and forth between those two during this season was a highlight for me. So, I'm just really thrilled for Harris.
And then I will say, my favorite thing in general about the NFL draft are the phone calls. They always record them so we get to see them, that the players get from the team before they announced they've been drafted. And I picked two from this year. So, here's a random one. This is Michael Carter who played ball at UNC finding out that the New York Jets were drafting him in the fourth round, 107th pick overall. And this was his joy.
Michael Carter: All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. Alright. [loud cheering in the background]
Jessica: And then I want to do a first rounder. Here’s Tulsa linebacker Zaven Collins, getting the call from the Arizona Cardinals in the first round.
Zaven Collins: Hello?
Steve Keim: Zaven? Steve Keim.
Zaven Collins: Steve! How's it going?
Steve Keim: Good, man.
Zaven Collins: [loud ruckus in the background]
Steve Keim: You got some dogs in the background? What do you got going on there?
Zaven Collins: [cheering and shouting in the background] Steve! How’s it going? Sorry, sorry…
Jessica: I enjoy those so much every year. It's the one thing I actually look up after the draft is over, just so I can watch everyone be really excited about their futures.
This week, thanks to Amira’s interest in NFTs – or, as I learned when I looked this up, non-fungible tokens – we decided it’d be fun to talk about technology and sport. We're each going to bring a different technology to the table and then discuss it. So, let's start with those NFTs. Amira. What are they?
Amira: Well, [laughs] a good part of it was just going to be saying non fungible tokens. And if you take that…Listen, I like many people have been seeing NFTs almost everywhere now. Every time I look on Twitter there's another report about something NFT-related, so of course I decided to do a deep dive to try to figure out what the hell they were. I think I'm perhaps more confused than when I started, but I will try to talk a little bit about them and how they relate at least to sports. So, what I've learned is that an NFT can be really anything digital, but right now art is really taking off as a site of these tokens.
Think of it as…There’s been a lot of descriptions, but the one that really stuck for me was like a 21st century beanie baby, right? And so a lot of the ways that we can think about this is through collector items, right, and the ways that people are using NFTs to say who has ownership of something. Why it's really confusing is because it's digital ownership of it, it’s basically like you're owning the receipt, but you don't actually own reproduction rights or copyright claims or any of the things that like you might actually care about. It's really just to say, like, I have the original of X, Y, and Z, and that X, Y, and Z can be almost anything. I mean, if you know that very famous disaster girl meme–
Jessica: Yeah, this is a good one.
Amira: –where the house is on fire and the girl is looking a little, you know, sinister, smirking about it. Well, she just turned 18 and sold that meme as an NFT for $500,000, and so definitely when we're talking about NFTs a lot right now, people are talking about them in the terms of digital art and what's being reproduced, whether it's a tweet or a meme, or, you know, people are actually drawing digital art. But in the world of sports there's like two things that really, for our discussion, I think are relevant. One, you see this in terms of businesses also trying to think about ways they can use NFTs for accountability, especially for things that people already collect like sneakers. So, Nike has patented a method to verify sneakers' authenticity using an NFT system, which they're calling crypto kicks. This isn't fully rolled out, but you can see the idea behind it is a way that this is a digital stamp, a digital marker of authenticity.
But beyond that, one of the ways that we're seeing NFT entering our conversation around sports is because that lot of athletes are trying to get in on the NFT craze, and teams are already having a lot of financial success in this regard. So for instance, it's estimated that in this past year, NBA Top Shot, which is a partnership between the NBA and Dapper Labs and controls and monitors these NFTs with virtual trading cards and other things, has already seen $500 million in sales on their platform. That is a lot of money. Washington Wizards, Capitals, and Mystics owner, Ted Leonsis, estimated that the proceeds from NBA Top Shot actually is worth more than many full franchises at this point.
And for sports, a lot of this is generating autographed shoes or authentic jerseys, authentic baseball card-like collectibles. And I think that what you're seeing here is an entry into a marketplace that a lot of athletes have identified, even if they themselves don't really understand what the hell is happening. And so even in the last few weeks alone Tom Brady of course has founded an NFT company called Autograph–
Lindsay: Of course! [laughs]
Amira: This is like the least surprising thing. Peyton and Eli Manning of course are launching the Manning legacy collection, which is digital artwork for each of their brothers. That's coming out in April. In a better use of NFTs, Los Angeles Rams safety Taylor Rapp has created an NFT to raise money to benefit an Asian-American Pacific Islander fundraiser to combat hate crimes. This NFT includes autographed jerseys, but also the chance to do a meet and greet or have game tickets. And so you're seeing that many athletes are seeing this as a space that they can really make inroads of.
We talked about this actually in a joking matter on the show a few weeks ago, Lindsay, when we talked about Croatian tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova, when she sold that area of her right arm as like get a tattoo, she opened that up. What we now can understand and connect it to this discussion is she was selling an NFT of that space in her arm to create that tattoo. And so that's basically what's happening right now. Of course you might have heard of this because last week, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe and many other female athletes were getting in on this NFT craze by being featured on collectibles designed by an artist, designing essentially digital trading cards for women athletes, including Bird and Rapinoe as well as new WNBA players like Charli Collier or Aari McDonald.
I think that people kind of at first were applauding this like, oh, women's sports and more autonomy, and here's another landscape for them to move in on. But there's other people who were a little less sure that jumping on something like NFTs was actually representing progress for women's sports. So, I don't have a lot of answers for what exactly an NFT is, but I do know that it's something to keep our eye on. A lot of people are seeing it as a marketplace that can produce a lot of revenue, whether it's for a random company that you're starting or for a cause as we see in the case of Taylor Rapp.
Jessica: Man, I just find all of this to be deeply confusing. Like, I gave up. I tried so hard to understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which I understand is related to NFTs. Blockchains are involved, all this stuff that I just…My brain can’t, in the same way that my brain can't understand the stock market. I mean, I understand all the relative value here. And even when you tell me that that's just like beanie babies, I think, well, at least with a beanie baby, you literally have a beanie baby. But my brain understands the ownership of a beanie baby differently than this. I think one thing that I find interesting, troubling about this move is my understanding is in order to mine cryptocurrency and to work within the space, that actually has a huge carbon footprint because of the amount of computer power that it actually takes, the amount of energy, the amount of resource that it takes in order to power these blockchains and whatever the right words are.
So yeah, there is a part of me when I see female athletes getting in on this or athletes who've been exploited in lots of different ways…Like, if this is going to be a big financial thing, I would rather it go to the laborers themselves rather than the ownership. And I understand them wanting to get in on this and not let the people who own these teams get the NFTs, the money for these NFTs. At the same time, I do just worry about moving towards yet another…We just had a whole discussion about climate change and the impact of sports. And I don't want to really see them participating in that either. So, I don't really have any smart thoughts on this. I don't feel smart when I talk about these things, but those are some of the thoughts rattling around for me.
Amira: Yeah, absolutely. Jess, when you first said like, when Sue and Megan announced this, that climate change, people were like, hey, like slow down. I was like, well, I just wrapped my head around this being digital, like where is the climate connection? And so that's what really helped me, like…You're right. That energy that is produced to maintain these blockchains, to mine these datas at a rate that allows a buying and selling and transferring and keeping track of all of that, pulls a lot of energy. But what I was surprised to find that there was actually a lot of people who are climate change activists, who, while there are people like concerned about carbon footprints, there's also a number of organizations that are both climate change activists and proponents of cryptocurrency.
And so there's weird ways that I think, I mean, honestly, for me, it all comes to being a new frontier of sorts. And I think that that’s perhaps what's so fascinating and also scary. Because I can understand if everything was like digital ownership, because it reminds me of like Ready Player One, like, okay, we all just like are moving to a digital life in certain ways. And so, you know, I think it's worth thinking through all these things, and we're seeing it impact not only these collectibles, these trading cards, et cetera, but you have people like Trevor Lawrence, number one in the NFL draft, who said my signing bonus, pay me in Bitcoin. And a portion of the signing bonus is going to go into his Bitcoin investing app Blockfolio.
And so, when we say that NFTs, we might not understand them, but it really behooves us to start trying to figure out what the hell they are because Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is not only about digital art, but we can see in a multitude of ways its coming into the athletic realm and the athletic space, and it's a thing.
Jessica: Yeah. Big moneyed space. Yeah. Yeah. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, I think like you all the climate and environmental impact of this both confuses me a little bit and concerns me the most, because that's not great, right? Like that's obviously not ideal and not what we want to be moving towards, this thing that has a bigger carbon footprint. That's the opposite direction, please. But at the same time, as someone who has spent the majority of their career in different aspects of kind of the online world, be it writing, be it content creation, be it video, and who has worked with a lot of artists, the idea, you know…Nobody has quite figured out how to monetize and own things in the digital space, and it's made it very hard for artists of all kinds, artists and writers of every ilk.
And so, hearing that this is a way for artists to figure out how to make money off of their work and for there actually to be an ownership aspect of it, as opposed to just the, you know, reproduction that we see that’s so easy on the internet, I got to say that does excite me. More ways for individuals to be in charge of their work and their image and their likeness, as opposed to just these big companies – which I'm sure now these big companies will take over it and blah, blah, blah, the circle of capitalism will continue. But right now I have to say that that seems like a promising development and it's something that the internet's never been able to do before, and for that I'd like to see this utilized in the proper way. And I also agree, like, if this is going to be happening, women's sports needs to prove their investability and their marketability in every single kind of space and money-making space that exists. Right?
And if this is a way in this world…You know, Alexis Ohanian, Mr. Serena Williams, as he is okay with being called, has come out and said how big of an opportunity NFTs are for women's sports. I saw Renee Montgomery launch one last week. We’re seeing all different kinds. So, I’m paying attention. I don't fully understand it. I definitely don't understand Bitcoin. I know they're tied together. But I like the idea of, you know, individuals owning more of who they are on the internet.
Amira: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great point. As I wrap up NFTs, just because when Sue and Megan and a lot of these athletes announced this, they were announced through Sportico, which is backed by Wasserman, and one of the things that was said about what this would allow them to do is actually NFTs circumvent a lot of name, image, and likeness restrictions that are usually mediated through leagues and through contracts and through unions. And so it is in many ways, as Lindsay saying, about power – of course, like almost everything is – and where, who right now has the power. Of course, I think as we all know, as this continues to grow, it's going to be a site of power struggle and exchange as people try to get more of a hand in it so that the athletes or the owners, or, you know, owners of artworks, producers of intellectual property, who right now are seeing a lot of lucrative opportunity in ownership – that’s going to definitely be challenged down the road. So, it's something to keep our eye on. And you know, now we know. Knowing a little bit is the first step. [laughter]
Lindsay: Non fungible token. Check!
Amira: There you go. [laughter]
Jessica: We got it. All right. So, I'm going to go next. And I will say that this is hard for me on some level, because I'm going to have to use a lot of Silicon Valley language to explain this. It’s like the kind of stuff I normally roll my eyes at and then tune out. But I am interested in what this company wants to try to fix. So, DarkHorse is a tech startup in California that wants to help high school athletes with their college recruitment by using artificial intelligence and deep learning software – stick with me! Like so much in life, getting recruited to college out of high school can involve like who you know, who your coach knows, if you can afford to hire people to help you, who those people know, et cetera, all that kind of networking. And so, as you can imagine, that leaves a lot of students out of the loop.
And so, DarkHorse is creating what it calls literally the Zillow for athletes, which will function in some ways as a social media app that allows students to get their name out there, but it goes beyond that because they want to capture analytical data about athletes that they can then rank them in ways that puts the best players in view of people recruiting for the best players. So, here is how a write-up at patch.com explains the DarkHorse’s technology: “By using video footage from a game and wearable trackers on players, DarkHorse’s machine learning system tracks specific data points for each players, such as shots, passes, average speed, and distance run. Its analytics methodology provides predictive forecasting for each player.” I love all this language. So, they're mainly dealing with soccer players right now. That's how they’re doing all their beta stuff on this.
And so, it will take away the manual work of a coach or a student having to figure out their stats, and then will give those athletes a centralized place to put those numbers. It will also give them hard data that they can send to coaches along with highlight videos and in a more efficient way. I think this is really interesting: instead of having to slice up the video of themselves – like, I think we've all probably seen highlight videos that these kids create that they then send around – the DarkHorse technology will allow people to go into the app, click on the player and then it will take the viewer straight to, say, their shots on goal. So there's a way that they can instantly see like the highlights from these students.
Ultimately DarkHorse says they want this technology to close wealth disparities in sports. I don't know how much I believe that. Still, they must be onto something because there's a bunch of companies that are working on similar tech right now. They're currently in their beta testing, they have about 1600 users in several local soccer clubs in that California area that are wearing the trackers and then feeding it into the video. The platform is free unless you want to access analytics. And then it's a subscription plan up to $22 a month.
So, I like the idea of this. I understand the holes that they want to fill in, how it's going to make some things easier. But then as soon as you start reading it and you're like, there's wearable trackers, there's video. Who's paying for that? Who owns it? Is a student buying it? Is a coach buying it and then lending it out? Are only certain students actually getting it? I have worries about it, but I do think it's interesting that they're trying to fill in this hole because, for a lot of students, getting college scholarships and being able to play sports in college is incredibly important to them, both for their education and just being able to continue being an athlete, right? So, Amira, what do you think?
Amira: Yeah. And it goes along with, you know, we've talked before about biometrics and ownership of them, right? And so I also think that you're right, that it does seem to also be setting up this kind of exchange where you're letting go of your biometrics and your data and all of this, on the idea that it's gonna pay off for you, it's going to benefit you. I think that question of ownership is really key, because you can see as an individual without that access, how that would be really beneficial.You can also see a team, a travel league, a u-team purchasing like a subscription plan writ large and then also having students, players in their feeder system, like, automatically kind of going through this. And it's there, right? I have gotten emails leading up to this week from a few companies who have different types of tech, but who are like saying, do you want high school data and stuff from draftees this week? Like, we're in beta testing of this, we're in beta testing of that.
And so, I do think that there's a way, like you said, that the goals about evening that playing field and understanding, especially in youth sports, how things that we often don't think about, like visibility and what you need in order to get recruited, are really worthy of thinking about. I like the tech that is saying, hey, we've identified a gap here. And like so much, I feel like every time we talk about tech, this is what it comes down to, is like, well, how is it actually implemented? All the things that you're saying it's going to do is very…You talk about Silicon Valley speak – it’s very pitched. It's like all of us, you know, we write. We are very familiar with making pitches and then sitting down to write and being like, what the fuck did we say we were going to write about? You know what I mean?
Jessica: [laughs] Yes.
Lindsay: No, not at all. Never, never. [Amira laughs]
Jessica: It just flows easily from your fingers.
Amira: And so I think for me, for so much of this technology, it's like, when you hear that, I'm like, how much of what we're hearing is a pitch? And what will that final piece look like? And you know, many times your final piece looked kind of a little bit like your pitch, but maybe went in very different places.
Jessica: Yeah. And I always worry when it's groups of dudes coming out of Silicon Valley telling me they're going to deal with wealth disparity, like, I just…Hmm! I am just so cynical that those are the people who are actually going to be able to do this. Linz?
Lindsay: I got to say, the whole thing just really, really, really worries me. I think we're taking a lot of numbers and a lot of data from human beings and taking them out of context, right? And I think the hope is that taking them out of context will eliminate disparities, right? Like, if we don't have the context. But I kind of worry the opposite, you know, that when you take data and kind of divorce it from any and all contexts…Just the very thought of this, as someone who writes stories, right? Who just practices journalism, like, one of the things is you cannot have numbers without some sort of context, right? These are attached individuals that are attached to families that are attached to coaches that are attached to games that are attached to–
Jessica: Yeah, the networking is still there, right? All of that is still in place.
Lindsay: When I think of the pressure, I mean, I know there's already this amount of pressure on these kids, but just the pressure of having every single thing you're doing be attached to a data point that's being divorced from context, and I think how that goes against sports a lot, right? Like, because so many sporting decisions that are made are made in the course of a game, right? Based on game flow, and based on these things. And I don't know. I mean maybe they're accommodating for these situations? But I just feel like we're missing a lot. Does it make any sense?
Like, we're missing a lot of context. It sounds to me like this data will be it's from games, it's from practices, it's from…You know, these aren't all from individual workouts, right? And there's so much context, like, I mean, down to weather, right? Like, is it raining? Will the stats account for that? Are the biometrics gonna account for that? So I would say I'm much more skeptical and concerned about this than I am excited.
Jessica: Yeah. If we've learned anything over the last 10 years, the promise of technology often does not meet the reality of it. Being able to fill in the holes of like the negative side of tech, we're so primed to see the positive, and when the negative pops up, we're like, oh shit. And we're talking about children here, right? Amira.
Amira: Yeah. The promise of it is absolute…I mean, I can't stop thinking about Theranos, right? [Lindsay laughs] Like, I can't stop thinking about like, that pitch was so seductive, right? That promise of what could…It’s here it is, we’re identifying a gap and all of these people are throwing money at it. It's wild. And I'm thinking about that in like, when me and Samari were listening to The Dropout, the podcast about Theranos, we just kept saying it's so wild because of anybody making these investments could like invest them in, like, I don't know, pressuring medical companies or like finding other ways and not, like, what is the next new tech thing to solve this gap and this disparity? But like, hey, we actually have other ways that we can solve these disparities, but instead of actually addressing them we want to invest in like a “cool" way of addressing them
And not to say that…Maybe this develops in this really great and it does address some of that, but I would also be really interested to see where the investment is coming from and how much is invested in this promise instead of something like thinking about eradicating fees in the youth level or reforming the club system for youth sports that feed into these systems. Those conversations aren't as sexy and aren’t as cool, to think about these gaps. There's so many would-be Theranoses around.
Jessica: There aren’t VCs for that.
Amira: Exactly.
Jessica: Yeah. There’s VCs for tech. All right, Lindsay, bring us home. What is happening in women's sports?
Lindsay: Yeah. So, I want to talk a little bit about Metrica Sports, which is a data and video analysis provider that says it's the easiest and fastest analysis software to deliver powerful messages to players. It's about helping coaches win games and innovative analytics using artificial intelligence technology and automatic player tracking. What does all of that mean, you might be asking? [laughs] Well, I don’t fully understand it, I'll be honest, but I was very intrigued because of an article this week by Katie Whyatt, over at The Athletic, who wrote about the rise of analytics and women's football – of course, soccer. So, Metrica Sports, they're already the data and video analysis provider to more than 100 teams across the globe, including a few schools in the United States.
But the West Ham women's team were the first women's team to use its technology, and this is exciting because it's going to really significantly increase the amount of data that West Ham has accessible to it without a huge price tag or a huge infrastructure investment, which is usually needed in order to kind of compete in this way. So, I’m just going to kind of read here from what Katie wrote, saying, “in most areas, the women's game is through no fault of its own miles behind the men’s, and the world of analytics is of course one of those.” Some big groups like the Barcelona women's team can draw on the identical analysis software used by the men's side.
Most women's teams don't have that ability, and this is because it's an offshoot of everything we talk about here on the show all the time, right? Generally inhabited, smaller stadiums, that lack the infrastructure needed to support the huge amount of video equipment and multi-camera set-ups that are needed to get this correct data analysis. So, it's all this trickle down effect. And of course there's the fact that a lot of analysis companies just don't care about women's sports, right? It's just like not at all a priority to them.
So, what Metrica Sports is showing us is that advancements in technology are really eliminating the barrier for entry. Metrica Sports automatically tracks and embeds numerical data, speeds, and distances over video footage from any camera angle for quicker and less subjective analysis. The owner has told Katie at The Athletic that it's very cheap to run this program, and also that this wouldn't have been possible for the women's game five years ago because the technology wasn't there and the costs were very high. “We couldn't provide the tools they have now at the price they have them now. The breakthrough came when Metrica realized how to track any game from any camera, even a phone’s camera.” So, they can literally use iPhone cameras to track this data. And you know, before this, these prehistoric stadiums and the threadbare training grounds were a huge limit to women's sports, but not any more.
So, I am really excited and intrigued. I hope that this spreads to a lot of other women's teams, because we know how much better data, like, as much as it can be a bad thing, as we talked about in the last aspect, right? Like for individual teams and for scouting and things, it's also a big part of like getting ahead. And I think the more barriers of entry to the elite level that we can eliminate in women's soccer, the better, because more competition breeds more investment, breeds more success for everyone.
Jessica: That is so interesting about the actual physical infrastructure of the places that women train and play in and the impact that would have on data collection. I had never even considered the way that those things would be related. And it is so fascinating because now that we are huge MLS fans apparently [laughter] and we're watching way more MLS than I ever imagined in my life, like all of those men were the little sports bras that collect all their data all the time. That's just like a constant, normal part of the game. We're talking about an expansion team that I don't know where all their money comes from, I guess the owner. But they certainly have already invested in all that technology that they're using. And it makes sense.
I mean, for all my fears about where bio data, how it gets used and who controls it, I understand why individual athletes and why teams want to be able to collect this stuff. You can see how that would make their training and their play so much better, more efficient, more useful to them so they can see. It's really hard to always see the holes in people's games and convince them that that's actually a problem with what they're doing. And so, if this is the future, which it is, we have lots of things to work out about that, but like, women need to be a part of this too. And the kind of data that they're going to collect is going to be different than men, right?
Amira: Periods!
Jessica: I know, that's such a huge thing. I talked to Layshia about periods, and then I talked to Kate from the Vicious Cycle podcast about periods. And yeah, this is just like a huge hole because so much of biology just in general is built on cisgender men's bodies, and so that certainly bleeds over into – bleeds over! – into sports. So yeah, this is exciting.
Amira: Look at that! No, I definitely think like, you know, for people who menstruate, it's really interesting. I love all the conversations we've had about it because I think, you know, there's so many period tracking apps in general and thinking about how that has helped laypeople, like, people don't play sports, you know?
Jessica: It’s magic.
Amira: Exactly. So, I think that that's really interesting, but generally I think Lindsay is exactly right when she talks about how all of these kind of new frontiers for tech and sports are areas in which we want to see all marginalized sporting people represented as well, because thinking about when you're building an infrastructure foundation of new emergent techs or leagues or whatever, we know how hard it is to then, when something's already constructed, to find a way in, right? Or make it more equitable. And so I do think that there is something to be said about what this requires us to think about in terms of building the sporting futures that we imagine, which is also understanding that pushes for a more inclusive tech world impact this as well.
The ways in which we can see this partnership between tech and sport is only going to continue to develop and be on the rise, and the more and more we can push for that partnership to include as these things are in their beta stages, have people in the room who say, well, is this equitable, right? Is this up to the promise that we think the gap is standing in? How is this going to be felt across the spectrum of people who play sports from the youth level to the professional level and everybody in between? And I think there's some really interesting conversations to be had there, and I only hope that we can continue to bring voices to the table in that way.
Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. I just think that, you know, last year sometime it was Jacob Mox did a piece for me for Power Plays about kind of the analytics gap in women's sports and kind of going sport by sport and just looking at the lack of, you know, numbers, and how hard it was to get, and how so many of these numbers were collected from completely volunteer institutions, right? Like, completely grassroots. So, every single thing that I think pushes forward in analytics…I mean, let's face it – it helps. I spoke earlier about how numbers out of context scare me, but the truth is when you see numbers they can also often lead you to a story, right? Like, you have to find the context of them, but so many, by looking at data, by looking at how players are improving or speed or all these things, you can then find that as a start of a story and then go after the context.
I just hope that this continues to expand, and that all these…I mean, if we could have one takeaway, it’s that all these tech companies continue to include women's sports as a place of real investment, because let's be honest, the innovation has been done on the men's side over and over and over again, right? There is so much more room for innovation and growth on the women's side. And with that is money growth, right? Like, actually getting a payback. So, I'm excited, and I want to think specifically Katie Whyatt at The Athletic for this great piece bringing Metrica Sports to my attention.
Jessica: For our interview this week, Amira chats with cultural critic Scarlett Harris about her new book, A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler : An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. They talk about the current state of women in wrestling, including issues of power, narrative control, race, gender, binaries, and fandom. Check that out on Thursday in your Burn It All Down feed.
Scarlett Harris: Starting about five years ago, they sort of underwent a women's evolution. That was mostly started by fans on social media wanting women wrestlers to get more time, more character development and more of the show dedicated to them. But then of course, as WWE is want to do, they kind of, you know, appropriated that and sort of made it their own marketing campaign of what we now know as the women's evolution.
Jessica: Now it's time for everyone's favorite segment that we like to call the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we’ve hated this week in sports and set them aflame. I'm going to start. First, a mini-burn for the ongoing anti-trans sports bills that continue to sweep through state legislatures in the US. Flamethrower Maggie Hermann wrote to us concerned about the one in her state of Louisiana. Maggie said, “I feel so hopeful that women's sports competitions can be inclusive, safe, equitable, and competitive and joyful spaces for people traditionally left behind by men's competitions. I hope men's competitions can be all of the above as well.”
This bill does not tell that story of hope, and even if it gets vetoed by her governor, the debate could deter young people from even bothering to join sports teams for fear their gender will be called into question, they will be unsupported, et cetera. We here at Burn It All Down agree and so, once again, we want to burn these bills. Like, I would love to literally torch them. We should just print them out and torch them
All right. For my full burn, I'd like to burn the abuse in Canadian women's rugby. In January, the Canadian women's rugby sevens team made a formal complaint to Rugby Canada about harassment and bullying by the head coach, John Tait. An independent review found that Tait did not violate any policies, but “the investigator also concluded, in agreement with both parties, that it would not be viable for John Tait to resume his duties as head coach of the national senior women's sevens.” Tait resigned. Ghislaine Landry, the captain of the team, put out a statement that was signed by 37, 37 women! 19 of the 21 current members of the team had their names on the statement.
This is how the findings of the investigation made them feel learning that Tait's behavior did not violate policy. It reads in part, their complaint, “Explain the psychological abuse, harassment, and/or bullying these athletes feel they were subjected to in the centralized training environment. The national team athletes have shown true courage in coming forward to shine a light on what they have experienced in an effort to bring about meaningful change to their sport. We followed the procedures outlined in Rugby Canada's policy, which was put into place in 2013. We feel that this process failed to protect us and did not acknowledge the abuse and harassment that we believe we suffered.” What is the point of having a policy if it doesn't protect the athletes – which, in this case, is the entire team! – from this kind of behavior?
In March, I interviewed bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, who left Team Canada after reporting abuse from her coach, who still coaches there, whom she still sees at competitions now that she is racing for the US. We need to do better by athletes. We need to root out abuse from sport. And I've said this before, but I just worry it's too baked in to how we imagine coaching should work in order to make the best athletes. But truly, at what cost? I'm so angry on behalf of the Canadian women's rugby sevens team. I just want to burn all of that this week.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Amira, what do you want to torch?
Amira: Yeah. I want to talk about Mark Emmert getting an extension. Yeah, listen, [laughs] I don't think we surprised. I think that even the announcement of the extension indicates how everybody knows that this is a terrible, horrible idea. Mark Emmert, the NCAA president who's currently under contract, has had it extended until 2025, so he can continue to make millions at the helm of an exploitative organization that is awful in too many ways to count. So, last Tuesday, buried in a press release that came out after 9pm – like, 30 lines down, a simple sentence noting, “oh yeah, by the way, we're still backing our guy.” And like I said, this is predictable if we understand that he is just the person in place to protect and shield the board of governors and the actual schools from catching any of the flack that he does.
We've seen this before with Goodell, right, getting a lot of the attention and flack as he gets extensions when people are mad at the NFL. And I think Emmert is somebody that we can see in fairly the same light. Something to me that happened this week that really drove that home was he finally met with four student representatives of the #NotNCAAProperty movement. They walked away irritated in part because A) he was condescending the entire time, but B) they asked again to meet with the NCAA board of governors, to which Emmert allegedly replied to them that that wouldn't be possible because student athletes have never talked to the board of governors and so clearly that means that they can’t, and they'll just have to go through him – which exactly is the point of this extension!
The longer Mark Emmert can be out in front catch all of the flack, whether it's over having, you know, a huge disparity shown during the post-season basketball tournaments and then volleyball tournament, whether it's having the Supreme Court absolutely annihilate any arguments against amateurism, having a bill in Congress about name, image, and likeness; having a complete ridiculous response to COVID, which is inaction, despite that being the year that Mark Emmert has presided over, right? The fact that this extension, a badge of, “hooray, you're doing a great job,” could be given – it’s laughable. And we all know it's laughable, right? But he will laugh at it himself to the tune of $2 million and some change each year.
And so, I think it's just ridiculous, and I think that, you know, there's no need to even bury it, just be upfront and do what you're already doing in the dark and the light, because we can all see you. We all see it for what it is. It's a sham, it's a farce, it's a disappointment, burn it down.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Lindsay, what are you burning?
Lindsay: Yeah, I'm tying a couple of burns together here because, well, you'll see why. [laughs] First of all is LSU. So, this week Jessica's reporting partners, Nancy Armour and Kenny Jacoby, reported that seven women have filed a federal class action lawsuit against Louisiana State, its leadership, athletic fundraising arm, and several top administrators, alleging they conspired to cover up the women's reports of sexual misconduct and dating violence, have discriminated against female students and deprived them of their rights. The women include three former LSU tennis players, two former football recruiting office student workers, a former student, and a current student. So, obviously we need to continue to follow what's going on at LSU and the aftermath of the reporting by Jessica, Nancy, and Kenny. We especially need to pay attention to it now that LSU has hired another company woman in Kim Mulkey.
So, big news this week was that Kim Mulkey has left Baylor and is now at LSU. To me, it is notable that she was at Baylor during all the years where their sexual abuse and sexual assault lawsuits and allegations were coming to light, and now she's going to another school right in the midst of that controversy. And I want to remind you a little bit of how Mulkey acted during that time. First of all, she said I believe in 2017, "If somebody around you says they will never send their daughter to Baylor, you knock them right in the face because these kids are on campus, I work here, my daughter went to school here and it's the best damn school in America.” So, cool. That is one way she responded.
She's also been notable in homophobia. There's of course the way she treated Brittney Griner who, according to the book by Kate Fagan which came out almost eight or nine years ago now, she encouraged Griner to stay in the closet and to, you know, cover up her tattoos and everything while she was at Baylor. And actually Kate Fagan came out this week and said that after that book Mulkey tried to get her fired from ESPN for saying she fabricated it! So, that's also cool. And once again, almost which concerns me the most, is how much Mulkey believes in on-court redemption for off court transgressions.
In 2019, when Baylor made it back to the final four for the first time in a while, and of course they went on to win the national championship this year, she repeatedly used that run as a way to say that Baylor had overcome everything bad that it happened to the school and use it as a sense of redemption. For me, using women's athletics as a sense of redemption for a bunch of women on campus being sexually assaulted due to the enabling of the athletic administration is gross. So, all of this is now coming to LSU, which is in the middle, like I said, of a very similar scandal that Baylor went through. And notably, part of that scandal is the fact that Baylor has not given equal access and equal resources to women's sports.
And now Kim Mulkey is going to be paid an average of $2.9 million a year over the next eight years, I believe. So, that money sure did come up fast. Now, I'm glad to see, you know, women's basketball coaches getting ridiculous amounts of money if the men's basketball coaches are, but the whole system needs to be reformed. Coaches like Kim Mulkey need to be held accountable and not just continue to rise up. So, I'm very concerned about this, I’d like to throw LSU and Kim Mulkey onto the burn pile, and especially the marriage of the two. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Burn, burn, burn.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports culture. Amira, what is our league to watch this week?
Amira: Yeah, British wheelchair basketball announced the world's first professional women's league and the UK’s the first professional parasport league. The women's premier league will start in December and have four teams. They are something we will be watching!
Jessica: Lindsay, who are our pitch champions of the week?
Lindsay: We've got the Rivers Angel FC, who retained their Nigeria women's football league title with a 4-0 win over Sunshine Queens, which is just a great name for a team.
Jessica: Excellent names. I know. Amira, who shattered a glass ceiling this week?
Amira: Lyon, which should come as no surprise. They're the most dominant soccer team, if not the most dominant sports team in the world. They have hired their first woman coach Sonia, Bompastor. She won two championship league titles with the team as a player. Let's see what she does as a coach!
Jessica: I have our gym champion of the week: Viktoria Listunova of Russia, the 2019 junior world champion, won her first major senior international championship at the European artistic gymnastics championship in Basel, Switzerland, taking the women's all around crown. Lindsay, tell us about our tennis winners this week.
Lindsay: Yes. We have Sorana Cirstea, who defeated Elise Mertens to win her second-ever career title at the Istanbul championship. It was her first title in 13 years. And also, world number one, Ash Barty – love Ash! – became the first woman in 20 years to sweep the singles and doubles titles at the Porsche tennis grand prix. That’s her third title in 2021. So, she is certainly cementing that world number one status! So, congratulations there.
Jessica: All right. Can I get a drum roll please?
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer this week is Deepika Kumari, India’s most decorated archer. She won both individual and team gold medals at the archery world cup stage one in Guatemala. India's women's team, which included Kumari, Komalika Bari and Ankita Bhakat, won gold after coming back from 2-1 down to Mexico. In that head to head it came down to a deciding shoot off which India won on Kumari’s sharpshooting here. Also Kumari and her husband, Atanu Das, each won the recurve men's and women's individual gold medals. This was her third individual world cup gold medal, nine years after her first. Look out for her this summer in Tokyo. Congratulations, Deepika Kumari.
Okay. What's good with y’all? Amira, what's good with you?
Amira: What's good with me is that I have a tremendous community around me. I had bilateral fasciotomy, which is a surgery on both of my legs to release the nerve that's around your muscle compartments. So, it's eight incisions. It's a nasty little recovery, but it's better than, you know, losing circulation in your feet when you run. So, I'm on the road to rehab, but it's the end of the semester, which is the worst time here and in particular my academic community has been dealing with a number of things right as we come down the stretch here, and despite it all they have made meal trains and given gift cards for food and brought over the most delicious baked goods and dinner spreads. And it's just really, really impactful to be part of such a caring and generous community, and it has made recovery that much better.
Another thing that was really good during this time was that my moms came down from Massachusetts – this is the first time we saw them in a year, got to hug them. I couldn't do much because I was in bed, but the kids got to be with their grandparents all weekend and that was really special. And so, recovery is stupid, and I'm not good at slowing down and I'm really not enjoying it, but I did finally use that time to watch Ted Lasso, which is the best show as far as I'm convinced. I've watched it three times already since Thursday. So, you know, getting a lot of grading done. [laughs] Yeah, that has been easily the highlight of my recovery as well.
And it was also my one-year Pelo-versary, and they sent me a nice little card to celebrate one year in the Peloton community, which I know is always the butt of many jokes, but it's also literally gotten me through the year mentally and physically. It's been so great to be, you know, also in community digitally with these kinds of Peloton communities that I work out with and have accountability with. And it was perfect timing, because this week was Peloton homecoming, which is virtual this year and everybody's not pouring into New York, which is like the annual meetup in person. But it being virtual has still been very cool. We have new features coming that have been awesome to see, but also panels on anti-racism in fitness. I just, before we recorded, was watching a conversation between Usain Bolt, Allyson Felix, and Scout Bassett about preparations for the Olympics and Paralympics and rest days and, you know, ideas about training.
And so this has been a really fulfilling weekend in many ways, and my biggest takeaway has been about community and about the love that I have received as I'm going through recovery and a transition and, you know, celebrating my wins with people as well end of the year.
Jessica: Wow, that was like a lot of good. I'm very impressed by that. [Amira laughs] I’m glad that you're recovering well, and I will say that one of my what's good is the short but effective crying voice note that I got from Amira at one point as she was getting through the first season of Ted Lasso and felt a lot of emotions. I listened to that six seconds like four times in a row because it brought me a lot of joy. [Amira laughs] I was like, what do I have? What happened this week? I just feel like I don’t…I don't even know. I had a big deadline piece due and edits due, and I got that in, and that felt insurmountable at times. Talk about Lindsay saying that she never has trouble with her writing when you start. [Lindsay laughs] Man, I know, right? It was like four words in and then I was like, oh shit, I don't think I can do this. But I got that done and that felt really good.
And then as is normal – I think the only thing I do anymore – is just watch television. So, this week we did watch Wolfwalkers, which is an animated movie that was nominated for the Oscar, but it's this beautiful Irish movie. It's on Apple TV+, it's just gorgeous. All of it. So the whole family really enjoyed Wolfwalkers. So if you have Apple TV+ I recommend it, which I know Amira does because she just watched Ted Lasso. Lindsay, what's good with you?
Lindsay: Yeah. So, on Saturday my little cousin turned – who I basically consider my niece –turned seven years old, and I was in the hospital when she was born. So it was just mind-boggling that it's been seven years. But we had to have little party outdoors and that was great. The weather has been wonderful in North Carolina, and in a week from today I'm fully vaccinated. I got my second vaccine last Saturday. [Jessica cheers] And so, this week, I started planning reporting trips and I started crying.
Jessica: Aww!
Lindsay: I started crying because I hadn't really like…When I launched Power Plays paid subscriptions it was at the end of February of 2020, and such a big part of my plan was reporting trips, you know, of using subscription money to fuel reporting trips, to fuel more growth. And then of course, a week later, that was no longer an option. I had forgotten how excited I had been about these trips and how much it's been a struggle to cover sports without being able to travel, without being able to have the access to the stories and to the people and to the reporting things. So, just thinking of getting some of these trips in the book literally had me sobbing. So, I cannot wait for that.
Jessica: I am so excited for you. I think this week we also started really thinking about...We’re hopeful that our kid who's 12 will be able to get vaccinated very soon. And so we've been thinking for real about actually traveling at the end of the summer, and that just feels like everything at this point. Okay, Amira has a big announcement for you flamethrowers! Listen up.
Amira: A few months ago, we mentioned how we had concerns about Teespring and the ethics of their care and service to the community, especially around what merchandise was appearing over and over again on their site, and we began the process then of looking for a new merchandise home for Burn It All Down. I am so pleased to announce that not only do we now officially have a new merch home, but our storefront is now live. That's right – all of the Burn It All Down merchandise is now available on Bonfire. This of course will shortly be linked on our website, our Patreon, all the places that our merch links currently exist.
On our storefront there you will find merchandise that you've grown to know and love, as well as new things. All of our merch designs, including our flame-head, our classic faces design, our matchbook design, all of them will be available on tees and tank tops, t-shirts that range from football cuts to baseball tees and everything in between, sweatshirts of course, and tote bags and mugs. We also have a revamped for the kids section for our littlest flamethrowers to get their BIAD swag on as well. Ultimately we chose Bonfire because of its commitment to premium quality items, but also because of its ethical sourcing – all of the brands they use are certified, which means that they have complied with ethical considerations all the way through the production chain. It makes us feel very good about where the products are coming from and how they are being delivered to you. And so that is why we chose Bonfire.
We’re really excited to launch this storefront, and we wanted to add that we want to take a page out of our good friend Megan Reyes’s book, and starting this month and onward, we will be identifying partner organizations that we believe in, that we support, and giving a portion of our merchandise sales in donation to those organizations. So, for this month, in honor of Asian-American Pacific Islander Month, part of our proceeds will go to AAJA sports task force, which is that Asian American Journalism Association sports task force that is helping to diversify newsrooms and sports reporting, and also will continue to help stop Asian hate. We will also be donating partial proceeds to our good friends at Athlete Ally in particular to help continue to combat these awful anti-trans bills that are moving through too many state legislations. So, please check out our new merch store over at Bonfire. Click the link in our website and go over there, grab you some stuff. Help us donate to these great organizations and show off your love for the pod. We can't wait to see some pictures from your flamethrowers in your new apparel.
Jessica: Okay. What we are watching this week: the WNBA pre-season is starting up. In preparation for the season I encourage you all to get a WNBA league pass. It's only $17 annually. It's such a great deal. The third round of the NCAA women's soccer tournament, the round of 16, is on Wednesday, May 5th. This includes Penn State and number one seed Florida State who will be battling it out.
Amira: Because the brackets are shit! I'm sorry. I should have burned that!
Jessica: Nope, we're not doing this.
Amira: Okay, but the brackets are absolute shit. That's all.
Lindsay: [laughs] That was another quintessential Jess-Amira interaction! Jess just just goes, “No.”
Jessica: No. [Lindsay laughs] I should have known when I wrote this in here. Okay. This includes Penn State and number one seed Florida State who be battling it out at 3:00 PM Eastern. So, Amira and I will be on different sides of the pitch for that one. The quarterfinals will be on Sunday, May 9th. There is lots of NCAA softball happening right now as teams get in their final games of the season. This weekend, starting on Friday, you can catch a whole bunch of series running all weekend, including number seven Oklahoma State hosting number one Oklahoma. Number 18, Tennessee, taking on number 12, Missouri, and number 23 Mississippi visiting number four Alabama. It's a great warmup for the women's college world series, which has its selection in less than two weeks.
NWSL Challenge Cup final is at 1:00 PM Eastern on Saturday May 8th. You can catch that on CBS and Paramount Plus. And the Madrid Open, one of the main clay court tournaments in the run-up to Roland Garros, it's running through Sunday, May 9th.
That's it for Burn It All Down this week. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon does our website, episode transcripts, and social media. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down, you can do so on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and TuneIn, all of the places. For more information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. From there you can email us directly or shop for merchandise – it’s almost tank top season! As always, an evergreen thank you to our patrons for your support. It means the world. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown. On behalf of all of us here, burn on and not out.
Amira: Okay. And can I just say, the brackets really are shit.