Caitlin Clark Credit: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Matt Yoder on

Update [7/23/2026, 1:53 p.m. ET]: USA Today columnist Nancy Armour has issued a statement regarding her Emmett Till comparison. Her statement has been added to the original story.

There’s something about sports media’s coverage about Caitlin Clark that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. And Nancy Armour’s latest USA Today column about the Indiana Fever star has set the new standard.

Clark has become a lightning rod that goes well beyond sports and into the culture wars. No matter what she says or does… or doesn’t… her every move on and off the floor is scrutinized like few athletes ever have. While she has grown a mammoth fanbase from her days at Iowa into the WNBA, it has come with an insane amount of drama. And 99% of it doesn’t have anything to do with Clark herself, but the world’s reaction to her mere existence.

The fever around Caitlin Clark was at intense levels during her rookie season in the WNBA, specifically around her rivalry with Angel Reese. It subsided last season while she spent much of the season out while suffering from injury. But it’s been reignited this year with Clark enduring even more physical play, controversy around her peers not rating her highly in All-Star voting, and the Fever now leading the Eastern Conference.

On Wednesday, ahead of the WNBA All-Star Game this weekend, USA Today columnist Nancy Armour threw down the gauntlet of Caitlin Clark takes with a column entitled, “Caitlin Clark’s flopping isn’t just annoying — it’s becoming dangerous.”

The column starts right out of the gate like a sprinting thoroughbred head-first into the Caitlin Clark discourse.

“Indiana Fever All-Star Caitlin Clark and her enablers must take the rest of us for idiots.”

Buckle your seatbelts, folks.

The fouls they claim occurred? The “contusion” she says she suffered? The technicals that aren’t deserved? Clark doesn’t suddenly become invisible when she’s involved in a physical play, so we can see what actually happened.

Which is that Clark is flopping. And her histrionics while doing so are putting other people in danger.

Does Clark flop? Sure. So does LeBron James. So have a lot of other basketball players. But LeBron isn’t the subject of columns that say he’s putting other people’s lives in danger, which is exactly the ride that Armour takes her readers on.

Armour says multiple times that she is not a Caitlin Clark hater. But instead of referencing the very real fouls she suffered during a particularly physical game against the Phoenix Mercury, including a fist to the throat and a reckless closeout, she cites two examples from this month where Clark embellished contact against the Aces and Valkyries.

From there, Armour throws a predictable dig against the sport of soccer and flopping at the World Cup. But then she takes it to a different level by calling out the white nationalist element of Clark’s fanbase.

It seems there is a white nationalist element to Clark’s fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic, made even more so because the WNBA is made up predominantly of Black women, many of them queer. When Clark claims fouls that don’t exist, when she goes on profanity-laced tirades at referees, those racists see her as a white woman in need of saving and take matters into their own hands.

Gray posted just one of the messages she got following the Fever game, in which a man called her a racial slur. After fans identified the man, he was fired by his employer, Hilton Grand Vacations.

“Enough is kind of enough,” Gray said on July 15. “These messages are not the first of its kind. There was other stuff too … It was just time. I got fed up with it and I just decided to share it.”

But it’s where Armour went next that truly lit the fuse on social media in linking Caitlin Clark embellishing contact during a WNBA game to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The WNBA’s All-Star Game this weekend is in Chicago, Emmett Till’s hometown, and a local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the wider consequences of her actions.

The paragraph was seized upon not just from culture warriors who treat any criticism of Clark like rabid dogs in an attempt to latch themselves onto her fame and fandom to justify their own existence. It was also criticized by mainstream voices who were astonished that the paragraph wasn’t just written, but passed through editors at USA Today in connecting one of the most tragic, heinous events in the history of the United States of America to basketball fouls.

On Thursday afternoon, Armour released a statement in response to the criticism.

In my recent column, I made an inartful comparison with the murder of Emett Till. I intended to connect the issues the WNBA is currently facing with its All-Star Game being hosted in Till’s hometown of Chicago.

I obviously did not provide enough context for that.

However, this point stands: There is a history in this country of perceived threats to white women being weaponized against African-Americans, and the danger that poses to Black players in the league.

Players have been abused online and have reported receiving death threats. That has to be taken more seriously.

I sincerely regret that my lack of appropriate context is overshadowing that important conversation and the action that needs to be taken by the WNBA to address it directly – for the benefit of ALL players.

These are very real and very serious issues. Is there a disturbing element to Clark’s fandom? Have Black WNBA players been the subject of vile abuse and racism? Yes and yes. But does Caitlin Clark deserve to have hundreds of years of terrible history thrown upon her shoulders where she bears responsibility for the actions of others when all she has done her entire career is just play basketball? No.

Could you imagine a column like this that would replace Caitlin Clark’s name with Patrick Mahomes, Scottie Scheffler Shohei Ohtani, or any other athlete and draw similar conclusions? Amidst the backlash, Armour’s X account is now locked.

The Caitlin Clark debate can lead to some very strange places. But it would be best for everyone involved to lower the temperature and try to regain some proper perspective, separating what happens on the basketball floor from the very real social issues that exist. These attempts to link the two intrinsically together only serve to further inflame the situation and eliminate what little common ground actually exists these days.

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