IDIOT OF THE YEAR: The worst of 2021

Bishop Sycamore, for getting itself broadcast on ESPN despite being a fake school and not winning a game in two years

The Tour de France Sign Lady, whose decision to aggressively brandish a message of good tidings to her grandparents led to the most infamous pile-up in modern cycling history

Antonio Brown, who jeopardized his career all over again with his inexplicable decision to (allegedly) forge a COVID vaccination card

Neil Olshey, because we’re 20-plus years into the new millennium and he still believes that berating people is the winning way to manage

Tom Brady, all-time underrated Idiot, who not only rescued Antonio Brown’s career but threw a tantrum as a grown-ass 45-year-old man while getting shut out.

La’el Collins, who attempted to bribe an NFL drug test collector. When that failed and he was facing a five-game suspension, the Players Association intervened and negotiated the number of games down to two. But that was not enough for Collins, who appealed the ruling, only for an arbitrator to determine the evidence against him was so plentiful and absurd that he deserved the original, five-game penalty. And then, just three months later, he PUNCHED A MAN WEARING A FOOTBALL HELMET

Kadarius Toney, who ALSO PUNCHED A MAN WEARING A FOOTBALL HELMET

The IIHF: The pandemic led to the cancellation of multiple tournaments, including the women’s U18 worlds, but they tried to go ahead with the men’s World Juniors right up until rising cases among the teams forced that annual spectacle to be scrubbed

Mike Leach, for his endless whining about players doing anything in their own self-interest, from transfers to bowl opt-outs

Lincoln Riley, For saying he was committed to Oklahoma, then leaving for USC less than a week later

Shad Khan, who hired Urban Meyer. Enough said

Brian Kelly, for adopting a terrible Southern accent after spending less than 72 hours in Louisiana and proceeding to test it out in front of thousands of LSU basketball fans. Also for this dance

Weston McKennie: We know Nashville is the Bachelorette Party Capital Of The World, but you can’t turn it off for just a couple days, dude?

Hockey, perhaps more than any other sport, makes a big deal of “letting the players decide.” Except Tim Peel made it clear that they do the exact opposite of that. Because when refs are intentionally trying to balance penalties and power plays, that’s rigging the game. Peel is hardly an outlier, and any hockey fan of any passion level is familiar with the term, “make ‘em even call.” You know you’re getting a soft call against you after three straight power plays. Which is the exact opposite of the whole idea here.

Again, the players “can decide” that one team should have a power play, because one of the players deciding is an uncoordinated clod who couldn’t keep up with Connor McDavid. They’ve decided that guy sucks and needs to sit. In Peel’s world, every player is the same, all an 85 on the EA meter, and things should just happen randomly. Except he’s said it out loud, so instead of just feeling and suspecting, now we know for sure.

Johnny Damon did, in fairness, beat us to the punch when he titled his autobiography Idiot. But that highbrow work was published more than a decade ago, and there’s been so much more to celebrate since then. Most notably this year was his drunken interaction with cops — and his subsequent DUI arrest — in central Florida. Oh, the gamut of stupidity that was run. The encounter, which was caught on glorious video, featured a clearly sauced Damon repeatedly telling arresting officers that “blue lives matter,” as if it were a magical password that could make his legal troubles disappear. Damon drunkenly opined that the traffic stop was politically motivated, as he was an ardent supporter of then-President Trump. (Again, the man’s autobiography is called Idiot.)

Police reminded Damon that he was in the midst of a traffic stop — because he forgot — and assured him that the incident was not caused by his politics, but by his driving nearly four times over the blood-alcohol limit. This did not prevent his wife, Michelle Mangan-Damon, from trying to physically intercede in her husband’s arrest, earning herself a charge of battery on a law enforcement officer. They’re perfect for each other.

In case you forgot why South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was an honorable mention in our March IDIOT OF THE MONTH edition, she gave us a refresher on her odious politics just this week.

Noem introduced a bill to bar transgender women and girls from participating in female sports. As always, those pretending to protect the sanctity of women’s sports don’t actually care about women’s sports, they’re just trying to further marginalize transgender people. That’s what made her an idiot in March, and it’s why she’s an idiot now.

“Gov. Noem’s proposed legislation is clearly fueled by a fear and misunderstanding of transgender people in our state,” South Dakota ACLU leader Jett Jonelis said in response.

If you want to know why baseball is in a lockout right now, and why the players view the owners as basically the Uruk-hai, you don’t really need to go any further than former Mariners CEO Kevin Mather. He gave the game away in one speech to the rotary club. This, in itself, tells you plenty.

Mather got caught complaining about the English language skills of various players, and bitching about paying a Japanese interpreter $75,000 a year. That’s how much these dickbags want to nickel and dime everything for an organization that’s worth a couple billion. For Mather, $75K is a nuisance. MLB owners find $75K on the kleenex when they blow their noses.

Mather also let the cat out of the bag by saying that Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert wouldn’t be called up until their service time would duck under the wire to stay under team control for another year. Or how they viewed Kyle Seager, one of the few players worth a shit on the Ms for the past few years while they swan dived into the muck on purpose, as “overpaid.”

Mather made it clear just how callously executives view players, how they’re viewed as just assets. At the heart of this lockout, that’s what everything is really about. Except Mather isn’t part of it anymore. Thanks to yelling the quiet part loud, he’s out on his ass.

All’s well that ends well now that Tiger Woods is alive, relatively healthy, and back on the course, so this one could have ended a lot worse for Barstool personality Kevin Clancy, aka KFC. After Woods’ severe car crash in February, Clancy took to Twitter to tell everyone that it was a “hoax” — and when the LA County Sheriff’s Department confirmed the details of the accident, he actually doubled down and said that they were lying, too!

Not really much of a reason to lie about something like this, and putting that flaming hot take out for the world to see earns him a spot on our Idiots list this year. Disappointing? Sure. Shocking? Not at all.

Don’t assume Zach Plesac has gotten any smarter after landing at No. 10 on our 2020 Idiots list — the Cleveland pitcher comes in at No. 45 this year. He’s still a colossal idiot, it’s just a sign of how incredibly dumb the world is.

Having broken COVID protocol to hit the Chicago bar scene last summer, getting himself sent home from Cleveland’s road trip as a result, this year Plesac found himself in a much more timeless situation of idiocy, injuring himself by, as manager Terry Francona described it, “rather aggressively ripping off his shirt.”

In the course of his rage-filled disrobing, Plesac caught his thumb on a locker room chair and broke it — the thumb, not the chair. The injury cost him the entire month of June and, really, his season. Because when you break the thumb on your throwing hand, that’s the kind of thing that can mess up your pitching.

After returning in July, Plesac made 15 starts and pitched to a 5.04 ERA, serving up 14 home runs in 84 innings. He avoided surgery, but could not duck a second consecutive appearance among Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR titans.

Matt Rowan is no household name, but he certainly made his impact in the idiocy sphere at a girls’ high school basketball game in Norman, Oklahoma. Perhaps he thought that since he’s so irrelevant and that this occurred back in March, the world has forgotten about his idiocy. We’re here to remind you.

After seeing a high school team kneel at the playing of the national anthem, Rowan said the following into a hot mic: “They’re kneeling? Fucking n——-s. I hope Norman gets their ass kicked. Fuck them. I hope they lose. C’mon, Midwest City. They’re gonna kneel like that? Hell no.”

And wouldn’t you believe it — his excuse and “apology” actually somehow made the situation worse. In a statement, Rowan actually blamed the racist statement on none other than his Type 1 diabetes. His blood sugar was spiking, he said, which…caused him to say the N-word? He also made sure to let us know in the statement that he was a Baptist, a former youth pastor, and a “family man.” Well, Matt, you’re also a racist. Congrats on making Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR rankings in spite of your complete irrelevancy. And your Type 1 diabetes.

It could be that Bradley Beal walked back his comments on the COVID-19 vaccine — “I’m still considering getting the vaccine. ... I’m not sitting up here advocating or campaigning that ‘no, you should not get that vaccine!’” — or that we don’t blame athletes for things their wives tweet (“Yalllll go right ahead and play around with that vaccine if you want to”) or that people simply like him more than his non-vaccinated NBA brethren, or that he managed to claw back a point or two by publicly disavowing the support he received from Ted Cruz, but Beal should probably be higher on this list.

Oh well. Only coming in at No. 43 can be his consolation prize for the gold medal he missed out on. All because he didn’t want to mess around with the vaccine, then got the COVID and couldn’t go to Tokyo.

Technically, Adam Silver isn’t an idiot. The dude is way too smart for that. He has degrees from Duke and the University of Chicago. However, his decisions over the past two years have been hella head-scratching. We’re still wondering why the NBA had to have an All-Star game last season without fans in the middle of a condensed schedule.

But, the reason he’s on this list is because it’s evident that the pandemic has him in a blender and he’s in over his head. After guiding the NBA between the Bubble and a season full of mandates that included no fans, or only the vaccinated ones, Silver looked like the man. Especially after he said, “As Dr. Fauci says, the virus will decide,” in October of 2020.

But that was then, and this is now. Reports have since emerged that the NBA might not have run the Bubble to the level of perfection they’d let on. And right now, the league is ground to a halt with dozens of players — and counting — have been in the health and safety protocols this season, as well as the postponement of multiple NBA and G League games. Two teams, the Bulls and Nets, combined for 20 players out in December. There are analytics teams for that stat, too. They’re called epidemiologists.

Whatcha gonna do, Adam?

The MLB not knowing how to market its star players (see Trout, Mike) is nothing new, so Shohei Ohtani not being more of an international sensation than he already is isn’t because he doesn’t speak English, as Stephen A. Smith so matter-of-factly said shortly before putting his Oxford in his mouth. He’s not a bigger star, because apparently people are still demanding athletes learn the local language. and the crack team over at MLB marketing still thinks Wheaties boxes are the best way to build a following.

Come like two steps further, read the translator’s subtitles, learn someone else’s culture, watch the highlights, anything but go on First Take and yell “SPEAK ANG-LISH!”

“After the games today and tomorrow, there’s four teams left, I think, on the men’s side and the women’s side, they need to dump the COVID testing. Wouldn’t it be a shame to keep COVID testing and then you got kids that test positive or something and they don’t get to play in the Final Four? So you just need to forget the COVID tests and get the four teams playing in each Final Four and go battle it out.”

Former Baylor Women’s Basketball coach Kim Mulkey said this after her team lost a heartbreaker to UConn in a regional final game. And this was back in March, well before the virus was under control, which it’s still not. Would you like to know what question she was asked that prompted that statement?

“Kim, you touched on it a little bit, but the resiliency of this team cause you guys got down 12 real early in the game and then even in that fourth quarter ya’ll got down nine, had a chance to win.”

Mulkey did answer the original question, but then felt it necessary to give her opinion that there should be no more COVID testing while doing a press conference on Zoom.

To some extent, this spot belongs to all Major League Baseball pitchers who tried defending their use of Spider Tack for grip. However, Yankees ace Gerrit Cole stands out from the crowd of cheating baseball players because he offered the worst defense/misdirection/non-answer we’ve heard yet on the matter.

When asked whether or not he ever used Spider Tack, Cole responded: “I don’t quite know how to answer that.” Well, it’s a pretty simple question. Did you or did you not use a substance, specifically Spider Tack, to increase your grip on the baseball, thus providing a greater spin rate? Cole basically says yes, without actually indicting himself. He and other sticky-stuff tricksters try to defend their methods by implying that pitchers have done this for generations, but that still doesn’t make it OK. Of course, this can be said about dozens of pitchers across Major League Baseball, not just Cole. Cole is simply the poster child of the Spider Tack sensation — a position he officially earned with this exchange — and his answer to a very simple yes-or-no question merely offers a peek into the mental gymnastics pitchers likely must experience in order to help themselves justify breaking the rules.

If pitchers truly believed it was alright to use a foreign substance to help them pitch, then why did they keep it a secret for so long? If it’s not a bad thing, why not just come clean about the whole situation? Cole and all the other Spider Tack users in baseball clearly knew they were in the wrong and not only continued to use those substances but even handed those secrets down, according to Cole, generation to generation in order to keep the cheating alive.

Andrew Wiggins held his anti-vaccination stance as long as he could leading up to the NBA season. Wiggins even managed to make the NBA Anti-Vax Dream Team, led by head advocate Ted Cruz alongside Kyrie Irving, Bradley Beal, and Jonathan Isaac.

By early October, either the pressure or his agent got to him because he ended up taking the vaccine a couple of weeks before the season started. Wiggins doesn’t strike you as someone to take a stance like this all the way in the same fashion as Irving. The thought of losing $9 million this year was likely enough to snap him out of his idiocy and get him to roll up his sleeve for the jab.

Those “beliefs” he talked about in September sure took a back seat when the rubber was about to hit the road. Once the time came near for those paychecks getting cut off, here came the needle. It came down to a business decision for Wiggins, and the almighty dollar won the battle over principles.

Everybody had a blast in June putting assist puns in headlines about John Stockton’s cameo in an anti-vax video, where he said he’d done a tremendous amount of research about coronavirus or the vaccine or whatever. It’s easy to drown out silly nonsense, but it’s not so easy when Johnny Assists is dishing out knowledge in his collared shirt on what was probably a recorded Zoom call — at least that’s the thought.

Can we get a little production value at least? Someone pass the ball out of shot and then throw it to Stockton at the start of his take, so it looks like you passed the ball to him? Maybe punch up that dialog, too.

“Hi I’m John Stockton, and I’m here to talk about how you can avoid those turnovers and maximize your misinformation in three easy steps, because this [shoots a jumper] is the only shot I recommend.”

The thing for U.S. Soccer, is that even though it didn’t actually pick the fight with the USWNT over equal pay (we know what you’re going to say, but we’re going to get to that part), is that there’s no way to look good. The USWNT is the most successful in the world in the sport, everyone knows the players and their faces by this point. U.S. Soccer on the other hand, is just a faceless organization, and if anyone truly knows the inner workings of it they all think it’s a bumbling collection of paranoid marmots. Which it kind of is. You can’t win in the court of public opinion.

And you certainly can’t win by picking fights with them on Twitter, or drawing the USMNT into the debate and putting the responsibility of paying both teams the same money on them. Which is what U.S. Soccer tried to do with their latest proposal, and then got pissy when that was pointed out.

The actual case is far more nuanced than most understand, with the structures of the two teams’ pay methods wildly different, including yearly salaries and different bonuses from organizations outside the purview of U.S. Soccer. It would be hard for the organization to explain all that in a Twitter thread, but that would have been a better course than this.

What makes Jonathan Isaac different from other unvaccinated NBA players? Why is he at 35 and not (spoiler alert!) up higher with the more prominent NBA anti-vax crew? Why isn’t he on the fringes of the list like Bradley Beal? It’s because he’s not as prominent as a Kyrie Irving, but he doesn’t get a pass like Beal due to carryover from his stance, which was to remain standing, in The Bubble. That, and the rumors of him coming to his vaccine philosophy by binging Donald Trump videos and studying black history were false.

Fun note: Isaac invited teammates to listen to him deliver a sermon (hard pass) his rookie year and none showed up. That’s sad.

It takes a special kind of idiot to move to a new city with a high-profile husband, and then use one’s social media to take shots at said city, all while expecting the new city to embrace one’s family. That’s pretty much the tack Kaycee Sogard, wife of then-Chicago Cub Eric Sogard, decided to do while Derek Chauvin was on trial for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Here’s a tweet she proudly liked, right out in the open for the whole world to see:

Apparently shocked that Chicagoans recognized her endorsement of the tweet for the racist dog whistle it was, she then became immediately indignant and blamed everyone else for “misunderstanding her,” when the problem was actually that people understood all too well.

Predictably, Kaycee is also a blatant anti-vaxxer, which actually saw her fitting in beautifully with Chicago’s North Side team, one of the least-vaccinated teams in baseball. And all the while Kaycee was letting us in on her extremely bad and uninformed views, her husband was hitting a measly .249 with an on-base percentage of .283. Not that there’s ever a time that racism and misinformation is acceptable, but she definitely doesn’t know how to read a room.

Both Kaycee and her husband were designated for assignment at the end of July, and good riddance from a city that deserves so much better than racist, anti-vaxxer wives chirping from the family section.

Perhaps it does a Chicagoan’s heart proud to know that a team in Detroit has had a rep for having two of the biggest assholes in baseball history as foundational players. And when you’re talking about being such an asshole to stand out in the world of baseball, you’re talking about a universal type accomplishment. Kirk Gibson stood out as a guy who, every time his name came up, it was almost always followed with, “Boy, that guy was an asshole!” Same goes for Jack Morris, who then backed it up even as a broadcaster by attempting some awful and hateful fake Asian accent when talking about Shohei Ohtani.

It was yet another crusty old dude in a sport revealing himself to be that, and one who probably never thought anything like that would be considered out of line. Who would have told Morris such in the past? He’s an asshole through-and-through, but these days we can at least feel a small sense of relief that, eventually, there are consequences. Morris saw his asshole journey through to its completion in the public eye, and this is how it ends more and more often these days.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach makes this year’s list for unapologetically suckling at the teat of the Chinese money machine. When Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai mysteriously disappeared from the public eye after accusing a former Chinese government official of sexual assault, the WTA pulled tournaments out of China in protest of her mistreatment, at a great financial loss.

The IOC would hear of no such thing, and instead Bach pulled the fascinating PR stunt of showing a photo of what was apparently a 30-minute video call with Peng Shuai that answered exactly zero questions about what was going on with her. The IOC says she’s fine, and since they’re obviously the beacon of all that is right and good, Bach says we ought to just take them at their word. Of course it’s normal for someone to lose all outside contact after coming forward with an accusation like that! Come on, guys, she just wanted some alone time at home. Not like China’s known for censoring stuff like that or anything.

Mark Davis probably could have made this list on his kids-movie-villain haircut alone, but he and the Raiders made it easier on us this year with a truly ill-informed graphic following the indictment of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd. The graphic read in unmistakable bold print “I Can Breathe,” which appeared to have been based off of Floyd’s last words captured on video, “I can’t breathe.”

While the Raiders were attempting to show their support for the guilty verdict, their statement read as incredibly tone-deaf — and got even worse when Davis stood by it after public criticism and kept it up as the Raiders account’s pinned tweet. “I Can Breathe” was also used as an unofficial NYPD slogan after the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. Yikes.

Being old and ornery is enough of an excuse for some people to throw caution to the wind and act like complete assholes in their later years. We don’t live by those rules here at Deadspin, so that means no matter the age, anyone carrying on like a premium jackass gets called out. Equality!

Having said that, Tony La Russa certainly tried his best to win Asshole of the Year in Major League Baseball. Too bad for La Russa, the league in which he manages had its sights set on the same prize.

In May, La Russa publicly blasted his catcher, Yermín Mercedes, after he smashed a home run in a game the White Sox already had locked up against the Twins. La Russa and his old school ways couldn’t allow this, and so he decided to play the “sportsmanship” card afterward to put his player on blast.

Hopefully, baseball will be in a much better place once these stuffy old bastards decide to move on and enjoy retirement. At that point, we can only hope no one feels the urge to shove a microphone in their face every time a player with dark skin flips a bat, watches his home run leave the ballpark, or just smiles while enjoying the game. Forget crying; apparently, there’s no fun in baseball either.

It goes without saying that it takes a special kind of stupid to have taken part in the insurrection on January 6. It also doesn’t take a genius to know that the U.S. Olympic movement is built on, like, pretending that everything in the United States is great at all times, and especially our Olympians, who are sold to us, via glossy video packages, every four years. So it goes without saying that wearing an authentic Olympic jacket to the most recent attempt to overthrow democracy was not only incongruous, but also a way to make oneself easily identifiable.

We will never know what the thought process was for former Olympic swimmer Klete Keller, the intellectual giant who showed up at the US Capitol on January 6 along with all the other NewsMax-infused brainiacs, but he has now pleaded guilty to a felony charge for his part in the insurrection and is facing 21- 27 months in prison. Keller also admitted to attempting to obstruct justice buy subsequently burning the highly distinctive Olympic jacket (along with his phone and memory card), apparently not realizing that it was pretty easy for the feds to narrow the list of Americans who both possess authentic Team USA jackets and who were at the Capitol on the day in question. Good thinkin’, Klete. Congrats on an outstanding 2021, full of good decisions. Best of luck at your sentencing hearing. Go USA!

The Montreal Canadiens managed to get into the Stanley Cup playoffs this year because they got to play in an all-Canadian division that included the Canucks, Flames, and Senators, and even then, with 59 points, the Habs would not have made the postseason had they played in any other division.

Still, Montreal made it to the Final before losing to the Lightning, a Cinderella run that should have built up a ton of good will. Should have, because Marc Bergevin immediately squandered it by using the Canadiens’ first-round draft pick on Logan Mailloux, a convicted sex offender who had asked NHL teams not to draft him. The resultant uproar led to Habs ownership issuing what wasn’t really an apology, but more of a “sorry if you were offended” statement.

Bergevin was eventually canned, not because of the draft fiasco, nor because of his ties to the scandalized Chicago organization, but because the team he built, which mostly sucked last year and was lucky to be in the playoffs, really and truly sucked this season. That did, at least, allow us to close the year with a laugh, with Jeff Gorton’s attempt at French in his introductory presser.

Where would society be without NFL referees for everyone to collectively gang up on? We haven’t seen a collective group of people this universally hated since before Nickelback became an ironically cool band to listen to.

The stripes’ idiocy soared to new heights in 2021 though with the implementation of the taunting rule. The most iconic moment of this new edict came in Week 9, when the Bears took on the Steelers.

After a huge sack in a pivotal moment of the game, Chicago linebacker Cassius Marsh “motioned” toward the Steelers’ bench. That’s it. That was enough for referee Tony Corrente to toss his yellow laundry. Corrente tried to defend the call with this limp comment: “Keep in mind that taunting is a point of emphasis this year. I saw [Marsh] run toward the bench area of the Pittsburgh Steelers and posture in such a way that I felt he was taunting them.”

To respond in referee language: After further review, that’s some bullshit. All Marsh did was take a few steps toward the Pittsburgh bench and glare at them from about 20 yards away. He didn’t even strike a pose. He literally just stood there and bounced slightly like he was in a Bella Poarch TikTok video.

Of course, that’s just one of the bad calls the league’s officiating corps has made this year. They also called Raiders tight end Darren Waller for taunting after he spiked the ball near in the Chargers’ general vicinity.

And it’s not just touchy taunting penalties! Referees allowed the Ravens to kick a game-winning 66-yard field goal against the Lions in Week 3 against the Baltimore Ravens after missing an obvious delay of game penalty. They robbed Dak Prescott of a rushing touchdown in his team’s game against the Eagles in Week 3. Then, they robbed the Cowboys QB of another rushing touchdown in Week 6 against New England. Prescott fumbled the ball on the very next play in that New England game, by the way.

We’ve only scratched the tip of the ref-tomfoolery iceberg, and yet we haven’t even begun to get into the roughing the passer penalties yet. Yeah, it’s been a horrid season for NFL officiating.

Meyers Leonard allowed his stupidity and ignorance to get him bounced from the NBA after using an antisemitic slur during a live Twitch stream back in March. The Miami Heat then traded Leonard to the OKC Thunder, where he was almost immediately cut.

At this point, the only thing that might save Leonard’s NBA career is that he’s 7 feet tall. He isn’t a good enough player to warrant a team taking a chance on him too soon following his explosively bigoted comment. It doesn’t matter if it was said out of ignorance or not. Most of us don’t believe his claim of ignorance about the word he used.

When people are comfortable and no cameras or microphones are around, that’s when you find out how folks really feel about the world and other people in it. This dum dum was live streaming, so he knew mics and cameras were hot, yet he still got so worked up playing a video game that he went the slur route (sure, who hasn’t hurled some spicy language at Call of Duty, but Jesus Christ, Meyers). If he’s that charged up over a game of Warzone, he may need a new hobby.

All-time idiot Kelly Loeffler couldn’t match her 2020 IDIOT OF THE YEAR performance, where she clocked in at No. 2, (“Somehow worse than Trump,” the headline read!) but she still managed to make the 2021 list.

No longer a U.S. senator nor owner of the Atlanta Dream, Loeffler, 51, has floated the possibility of running again in Georgia, where she is 0-1 in elections. She has started a new organization, Greater Georgia, as a counter to Fair Fight, which seeks to ensure voter rights. What is it when you’re on the opposite side of voting rights? Well, it’s idiotic, for starters.

Whitlock began writing regularly for conservative outlet The Blaze on June 8. Here are some of his column headlines:

• Simone Biles and the celebration of quitting are latest signs America has been hacked
• America’s toxic femininity pandemic provides China huge advantage in the Mold War
• NBA star Kyrie Irving is Muhammad Ali, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has abandoned his religious convictions
• Kanye West’s ‘Thanksgiving prayer’ illustrates the dangers of marrying a feminist

It would stand to reason that leaving Clay Travis is a sign that a person is turning toward intelligence. Instead, it appears that Whitlock just wanted more creative freedom to twist everything wrong with America into his twisted sense of right.

The year is 2021. A world-class athlete is banned from the Olympic Games for substance use. The drug in question? Reefer. Sha’Carri Richardson was robbed of her opportunity to show her stuff on the grandest of stages, and it is the fault of the bureaucrats at the United States Olympic Committee and their archaic rules. Sure, anabolic steroids and HGH are not in line with principles of honest competition, but marijuana? Keep smoking those jazz cigarettes and you’re liable to leap from a window in a fit of paranoia. That Loud is now legal for recreational use in many states, with studies painting a pretty clear picture of its relative safety, but these doofs still saw fit to go by the book and steal one from Sha’Carri. For shame, you nerds.

Only in America can being a semi-recognizable Power 5 college football pledging his allegiance to a silver-spooned reality show host, who got himself fired from said reality show for bigoted statements, facilitate your election to a federal government post.

It worked out for Tuberville, who is now a member of the United States Senate. The reward for the rest of us is a man who voted to destabilize America by voting against certifying the presidential election, tried to squeeze anti-trans legislation into a bill designed to protect Americans, and was unfamiliar with the three branches of government — ya know, the first thing a child learns about the government after the words “president” and “vice president.”

There might be bigger idiots in this world than Tommy Tuberville, but it might not feel better calling anyone else an idiot than him. For the three seconds it takes to say “Tommy Tuberville is an idiot,” it’s a massage for your whole insides. Like sitting next to a fire on a cold winter’s night with a significant other, it just feels right. Let’s all say it together, 1… 2… 3…

Tommy Tuberville is an idiot.

It can’t be anyone’s life goal to be Erika Nardini — or worse yet a knockoff Nardini — but that’s what Rachel Luba appears to be aiming for. As an agent specializing in the worst of the worst, Luba’s only name clients as an agent are Trevor Bauer and Yasiel Puig, who are accused of being monstrous sex criminals. So does she seek these creatures out? Is it just coincidence? Does she think it’s just being in the middle of the fire and all part of the job? Maybe monsters just flock together.

We heard a lot of terrible takes when it comes to COVID and vaccinations in 2021, and many of those came from professional athletes. So to stand out even amongst all the terrible athlete hot COVID takes is a real achievement that deserves recognition.

So today we salute Kirk Cousins, he of the “if I die, I die” COVID stance, truly, one of the dumbest things said in the COVID era, especially from a guy who travels to different cities every week and yells over the top of people for a living. After first suggesting he could just surround himself in plexiglass (the way George Costanza dreamed of draping himself in velvet), and telling the world he planned on taking a “survival of the fittest” approach, Cousins has been mum on his vaccine status, because even if he is vaccinated, some kind of dumb-ass code among white Evangelicals prevents them from admitting it. Cousins’ stance is even stupider given that Vikings’ offensive lineman Dakota Dozier, who is vaccinated, wound up in the hospital after contracting COVID. Given Cousins’ stance, it’s become a favorite pastime this season to watch him saying it and spraying it everywhere in the huddle and the sidelines.

It’s a ride every time Cousins opens his mouth to opine on anything other than football, but for a guy who proudly talks about being a Christian every chance he gets to completely disregard the well-being of those around him… well, that’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR territory.

Did MLB do anything right this year? Not really. They had scandals galore from past and present and even created new ones that came and went quicker than Jarred Kelenic in his first stint with the Mariners.

The fact that no one is talking about MLB secretly using two different styles of balls to promote specific narratives based on the game being played is just a testament to how poorly MLB was run in 2021. That story doesn’t even turn heads.

Athletics center fielder Ramón Laureano uses PEDs? No one cares. A letter allegedly containing evidence of the New York Yankees using high-speed cameras to steal opposing signs during the Astros scandal remaining unopened just to keep blame pointed at one singular team? That draws no attention. Major League Baseball also had an opportunity to market itself immensely to American and other foreign audiences with the emergence of Shohei Ohtani. Did they use his incredible, never-before-seen season to expand the sport’s marketability? No.

Geez. Major League Baseball was so bad this year, the organization must’ve been run by an absolute imbecile. Perhaps (spoiler alert!) we’ll get to him a little later.

The NCAA went up against the Supreme Court this summer and lost spectacularly. You know how idiotic you have to be to get that group to agree, 9-0, that your business model is illegal? The answer is really idiotic. The highest court in the land found the NCAA to be in violation of national antitrust laws stemming from its aggressive insistence that the “amateur” sports model prohibit student athletes from receiving any educational benefits outside of their athletic scholarships. That little amateurism charade wasn’t going to work forever, and the Court pointed out that the America’s most annoying organization is bringing in ridiculous amounts of money each year — which kind of makes the whole mission statement thing look like a way to hoard that wealth for the higher-ups rather than distributing benefits to the actual athletes.

Well, despite complainers left and right (many of whom are making millions a year themselves), this year has proved a pivotal turning point in athlete compensation and athletes’ autonomy within the system. The NCAA is losing its tyrannical grip and desperately trying to make up for it by punishing schools who cooperate with their investigations. One can only hope Mark Emmert and company are knocked down a few pegs after this year.

The Houston Texans owner didn’t have as friendly of a crowd as he thought he did at a charity golf event in May, when he referred to COVID as the “China virus,” a term popularized by Donald Trump in the final months of his presidency. God, the NFL’s been such a hot mess this year that ol’ Cal here got off easy on this one, especially since the news broke months after the comments had actually been made. The complete ignorance of the comment is made more insensitive by the steep increase in hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans in the United States over the past year and a half.

At least he was, hopefully, embarrassed — one witness said that he and his wife seemed to be the only two people in the room who found his comment funny, while the rest of the group was appalled and actually gasped aloud. Maybe he’s just trying to outdo his racist father, the late former Texans owner Bob McNair, who told a room full of NFL owners that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison” during the height of the kneeling protests. Classic McNair family stuff here.

The World Series Champs make our top 20 for their insanely stubborn insistence on keeping the organization’s racist mascot alive. They’re not being asked to reinvent the wheel here, as several teams have already pivoted away from their own cartoonish Native American mascots, including the Cleveland Guardians and the Washington Football Team, but not only does Atlanta firmly stand by its mascot in the face of actual living Native Americans telling them it’s not okay — they also encourage the “Tomahawk Chop” from their fans, who had the opportunity to perform said offensive gesture this fall on a national stage.

As we pointed out in October, change likely won’t come until sponsors threaten to pull their funding, which hasn’t happened yet. For a more in-depth look at why the name is so problematic, you can read our article on the Chop and the Atlanta baseball team here.

Look, we’re not saying that the artist formerly known as Enes Kanter is definitely CIA, but it sure is interesting that the seldom-used Boston Celtics center likes to speak out against governments that the U.S. is engaged in propaganda campaigns against, like China and Venezuela.

Strangely, the former Turkish citizen is silent on human rights abuses in Palestine, and has never uttered a word about the U.S. arming Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Nothing on the U.S. killing Muslims in the war on terror? Which included, regularly, U.S. forces bombing Chinese Uighyurs. Bet they were thankful for all that freedom.

Equally strange are these bedfellows: liberals now joining the chorus of MAGAs mouthing, “What about China?” to LeBron James. That Mike Pompeo-Donald Trump foreign policy sure goes down better after voting blue, huh? The dumbest part of all this is Kanter invited James and Nike president Phil Knight to see the “slave labor camps” in Xinjiang, which is… checks notes… the biggest tourist attraction in the world. So you think an authoritarian regime is going to let you saunter in with one of the most famous people on the planet to see all human rights abuses going on? And no one in Western media even called bullshit on this. But we will. Idiot.

Racehorse trainer Bob Baffert unwittingly became one of the funniest idiots of the year when he blamed none other than “cancel culture” when it was discovered that his Derby-winning horse (RIP Medina Spirit) had tested positive for a banned substance. Did agents of cancel culture dope up that horse, Bob? In a sport that’s filled to the brim with unbearable and filthy rich people, Baffert somehow takes the cake on this one. One excuse he made claimed that a groomer had taken cough syrup and peed in the horse’s stall, and the horse had proceeded to drink it.

This was far from Baffert’s first offense of the sport, nor was it his first time using some half-baked excuse, which was why Churchill Downs temporarily banned him (again, not “cancel culture,” whatever he meant by that. That you can’t get away with illegal doping anymore? Yeah, okay). The cherry on top was when Baffert’s attorney went on CNN and said that he was, direct quote, “the Michael Jordan of horse racing.” Just incredible stuff there.

There’s probably no one on this list who is more willing to admit he’s an idiot, while doing nothing to change it and taking no responsibility for it, than Matt Nagy. We’ve spent the whole season illustrating all the things he can’t or won’t do despite his status as a supposed offensive genius. He doesn’t protect his rookie QB, he doesn’t make things easy, doesn’t stick with what’s working, doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t see what would be his salvation, and so on forever.

The thing with Nagy is, he’ll tell you that. Every postgame presser is filled with, “Yeah, we gotta look at that.” Or, “That’s on me, I have to be better about that.” Or, “That was my call.” So he doesn’t run from his idiocy. He acknowledges it, which I guess puts him a half-notch above Urban Meyer, who bus tossed so many people on his way out that all Jacksonville public transportation vehicles come with a cow-catcher.

And yet nothing ever changed in Chicago. All the same mistakes kept getting made. Which makes it sad, mostly. Nagy can see the problems, and he knows it’s his fault. And yet he can’t see that there’s another way. He thinks he has to keep running into the same wall. He can’t walk around it. He can’t go over it, even though that’s what everyone else does. He must not think he’s worthy of another plan, another method. It’s tragic, in a way.

Oh, Cole Beasley. Where do we start with this colossus of idiocy? Was it how he deactivated his social media after being called out by pretty much everyone for his insane COVID hot takes? No! We congratulate Cole Beasley for deleting Twitter. Hopefully more who share his thoughts on the virus, and on vaccines, follow his lead. But he finds himself here, in our top 50, for the mountain of nonsense he posted up until October.

Like this:

“I may die of covid, but I’d rather be actually living.” Profound!

Or this:

“I’m not going to take meds for a leg that isn’t broken.” Cool! That’s… not really relevant here, but good for you?

Or this!

“I’d rather take my chances with Covid and build up my immunity that way. Eat better. Drink water. Exercise and do what I think is necessary to be a healthy individual.”

Water is not — well, fuck it. Never mind. You do you, man. Just don’t catch COVID and get yourself knocked out of a pivotal late-season game. Oh, too late.

Ron DeSantis is a turd. The foulest of turds. Ron DeSantis is the type of foul turd that a person with no appreciation for your hospitality would leave in your toilet, not flush, not spray, leave the door open, and refuse to wash their hands after. He is as foul of a turd as there is floating in the toilet bowl of American leadership.

His new Stop W.O.K.E act is: a legislative proposal that will give businesses, employees, children and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination. That is a literal sentence on the website of a public servant of the state of Florida. His No. 1 goal at this point appears to be, outside of getting re-elected, is to pull out every stop in his quest to make the state less welcoming for racial minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.

DeSantis has even found a way for his foul stench to creep into sports. He signed one bill over the summer to promote “intellectual diversity” in college education. Students and faculty will be surveyed to make sure there is a “diversity” of opinions on Florida campuses and if a student feels that a professor is not allowing them to freely express their opinion, they can record the class with no penalty. DeSantis also passed a law forcing athletes in secondary and post-secondary public education to compete against the members of their sex, not their gender identity. For him, in the middle of a pandemic, gun violence epidemic, inflation, and rising hate crime rates, making sure that ignorant and offensive viewpoints can be shouted or taught in a college classroom with no judgement or reprimand, and an athlete at a school is not allowed to participate in athletics in a way that makes them most comfortable.

So when you’re in Florida and everyone once in a while that nasty swampy stench hits you in the nose, it’s not just the swap you’re smelling. It’s a turd in Tallahassee flushing his stench into every inch of the state he governs.

Thom Brennaman, born on third base thinking he hit a triple, is proof that there’s no such thing as cancel culture.

When he was fired by Fox Sports in 2020 — something that he saw coming during his infamous “deep drive by Castellanos” failed apology — it would have made sense if Brennaman had to go find another line of work. Call that cancel culture, or call it facing consequences for your actions, but there’s some logical flow to “man says homophobic slur on the air, man never broadcasts another game.”

But Brennaman has been broadcasting games, calling high school football in Cincinnati and trying to build prep sports streaming into a business. We learned this from a fawning Sports Broadcast Journal interview in which Brennaman talked about what a struggle he’s had, how much help he’s had from incredibly famous and powerful people like Bob Costas and fellow silver-spoon broadcaster Joe Buck, how he thought Fox would “make a statement” by hiring him back, and how proud he was of getting Urban Meyer to come on his podcast. That last one became much funnier later on.

Just because your dad was the longtime voice of the Cincinnati Reds doesn’t mean that it’s your birthright to have that same job for as long as you want it. Brennaman already got away with being a lousy broadcaster for years, but after being fired for reasons that even he could understand, he felt that he should be welcomed back with open arms after “14 months of hell?”

Brennaman talks a lot about how he’s “a man of faith” and “a good Christian,” yet at no point does he seem to grasp the concept of penance. In the year after doing something so egregious, that he got taken off the air, what did Brennaman do to make amends?

“I immediately talked with Billy Bean, who’s MLB’s director of inclusion and social responsibility,” Brennaman said. “He offered to assist me and did.”

That’s right, he talked to one (1) gay man, who… assisted him? Assisted him how? Why is it even Bean’s task to assist Brennaman? Assist him in understanding that you don’t say “f- -” into a hot mic?

No, Brennaman still doesn’t get it, which he showed in his criticism, in the same interview, of Grant Napear losing his broadcast gig with the Sacramento Kings over an “All Lives Matter” tweet.

“How do you justify it? What did he do?” Brennaman asked. “If we live in an environment that BLM matters, don’t all lives matter? That makes you a racist? How ludicrous is that?”

The ludicrous thing is continuing to not grasp, or pretending not to grasp, that “Black Lives Matter” is directly connected to police violence, and that saying “All Lives Matter” in response is like telling someone whose house is on fire, “All Houses Matter.”

Brennaman could be an idiot just for that. With his continued persecution act, even as he’s still saying what happens in sporting events in exchange for money, Brennaman is on a shortlist for IDIOT OF THE YEAR.

Where does one even begin to talk about Ted Cruz? He’s a politician through and through in the worst sense of the word, a deeply cynical man who not only thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, but that everyone else is too dumb to see through his oily facade. Ted Cruz is an older and more dangerous Eddie Haskell, one who thinks he’s charming Mrs. Cleaver, when he’s actually less self-aware of his unctuous visera than everyone else in the room. All of that said, and his attempts to take down the Republic and democracy aside, he’s also a huge idiot.

Back in February, while the state of Texas was dealing with a massive power outage that saw both the Stars and the Mavericks having to postpone games and, more importantly, led to the deaths of more than 200 people, Cruz attempted to slink off to Cancun with his family, and only returned to seek aid for his constituents when he was caught at the airport and shamed into returning by social media.

We’ve already mentioned that Cruz thinks he’s much, much smarter than the rest of us, and he basically blamed abandoning his state during a climate crisis event on his tween daughters, who were 10 and 12 at the time. So profile-in- courage of you, Ted! In a breathtaking display of cruelty, the Cruz family left their dog, Snowflake, home alone, in the same cold, darkened, powerless house that Heidi Cruz deigned uninhabitable for her family, because it was, in her words, “FREEZING.” This is probably not too surprising. How much, really, can the family dog expect from Cruz, who spent the last four years sniffing the malodorous chair of the guy who publicly called his wife ugly? If you won’t stand up for your life partner, the family poodle doesn’t really stand a chance.

All of that happened before we even made it to March, back when we thought COVID could be over by last summer. That was before Delta and Omicron reared their variant heads and, as summer faded into fall, it became clear that nothing in America was returning to normal, in part because a huge swath of Americans refuse to get vaccinated against COVID. And guess who is whipping up support for anti-vaxxers across America and especially in the sports world? You got it, Ted Cruz.

Let’s be clear, Ted Cruz is vaccinated. Ted Cruz’s entire family is vaccinated. Ted Cruz knows that more than 800,000 Americans have died as a result of COVID (hey, remember when The Former Guy estimated total COVID deaths of around 60,000? That was a fun fantasy). Ted Cruz doesn’t care, because Ted Cruz and his misguided beard know that leveraging the far right is his only hope of staying in power and, one day, being President. And Ted Cruz desperately wants to be President.

Which is why you never hear that Ted Cruz is vaccinated or that Ted Cruz “supports” vaccines, but you DO see Ted Cruz all over TV and social media defending those who refuse to get vaccinated. Like the sports world’s second favorite anti-vaxxer — after Aaron Rodgers — Kyrie Irving. Ted, who hasn’t yet figured out how to use Twitter without getting beaten over the head for every dumb thing he says, loves to weigh in on sportsball:

Gosh, if only Ted felt like it was “your body, your choice” when it came to other things, like, say, reproductive freedom. But we digress:

Lest you think Ted was sincere in his tweets and not making contemptuous play to draw sports fans to Isengard, you should know that he also picked a Twitter fight with Big Bird over vaccinations for kids.

In a year full of great decisions by Ted Cruz, weighing in on sports and vaccinations were among the worst though, as we’ve seen, not the ultimately rock bottom for the Texas senator. Ted Cruz, who speaks derisively about Black Lives Matter frequently and uses BLM protests to excuse the Capitol riots for attempting to subvert the Constitution, doesn’t give a single shit about Kyrie Irving’s freedom in any sense outside of COVID vaccinations, because that’s the one thing he can contort for political gain. Ted Cruz has no real objection to vaccines or mandates. Ted Cruz thinks he’s being canny. Ted Cruz thinks you won’t notice.

Ted Cruz is an idiot.

Earlier on in this endeavor, we said that Major League Baseball was, collectively, one of the year’s most glaring idiots. The league had endured numerous scandals involving individual players and/or entire franchises, and was never able to divert attention from the scandals onto the actual baseball being played. MLB’s dirty laundry was only forgotten by the general public when some newer, shinier scandal made its way onto the scene.

The man in charge of Major League Baseball, commissioner Rob Manfred, is entirely to blame for all of these scandals. Yes, the Astros, Red Sox, and allegedly many other teams cheated with their own various sign-stealing scandals, but did Manfred severely punish these teams for damaging the integrity of the game? No. The Astros suffered a few front office suspensions, were stripped of a few draft picks, and fined $5 million, which is roughly the price equivalent of a Nachos Bell Grande at Taco Bell to you or I. The Red Sox had their manager and a team video operator suspended. That was all. They both got away with slaps on the wrist, hence why so many MLB fans were still upset with the Astros and Red Sox even after “punishment” was doled out.

What made fans more or less forget? The Spider Tack scandal. Dozens of pitchers, potentially hundreds, were using illegal sticky substances to increase grip on the baseball and produce more spin. These weren’t just no-name pitchers either. There were former Cy Young winners wrapped up in the scandal: Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, Félix Hernández, and many other prominent pitchers in Major League Baseball were named in various reports revolving around illegal sticky substances since long before Spider Tack, the brand, became an issue. That merely brought all these past reports back to the surface.

What made fans forget about sticky substances? When another former Cy Young winner involved in the Spider Tack scandal, Trevor Bauer, had several sexual misconduct allegations thrown at him.

All that and we haven’t even gotten into Marcell Ozuna, Ramón Laureano, Cleveland Guardians, Atlanta Braves’ “tomahawk chop”, or MLB secretly using two different styles of baseballs, because those were minor in the face of everything else the league endured this season.

Major League Baseball had an incredible opportunity to broaden its audiences this season with the emergence of two great, young, international superstars in Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto, each of whom finished first and second-place in MVP voting respectively in their leagues. Instead, MLB found itself drowning in a myriad of scandals that Manfred consistently refused to take accountability for. Shameful.

One of the biggest storylines of 2021 has been that of Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets. We should’ve known we were in for a roller-coaster ride last fall, when Irving said on Kevin Durant’s podcast that the Nets didn’t really need a coach. Steve Nash, the team’s allegedly unnecessary head coach, should have turned and walked away then and there.

First it was his two-week hiatus during the middle of last season, and then it was his refusal to get vaccinated — Kyrie indeed dominated the headlines this year, and not for good reasons like “winning games” or “setting a good example.” All of it came down to Irving’s me-first attitude, and his insistence on doing whatever the hell he wanted to do regardless of how it affected his so-called “brothers” on the Nets.

Irving claims he’s been the voice of the voiceless for workers who lost jobs for not being vaccinated during the pandemic. Kyrie still has a job, though, and continues to collect checks despite not playing a game this season. His claims of needing to do more research on the vaccine is a bunch of bullshit, too. Like most others claiming they needed to do more of their own “research,” Kyrie is full of it and doesn’t care about anyone. Absent some type of medical or religious reason, they’re declining out of pure selfishness. Let’s just be honest.

Remember during Irving’s hiatus last season when he popped up on a Zoom call for a Manhattan DA candidate, on camera, calling himself “Kai” as if nobody would recognize him? Coincidentally, this meeting happened to take place at the same time as a Nets game in Brooklyn. But Kyrie needed time to clear his head. Yeah, that’s convenient. Plenty of Americans were disturbed by the Trump battalion ambushing the Capitol on Jan. 6, but most of us still got up and went into work following the attack. Irving needed time afterward to decompress by not playing basketball, but he had time to show up on camera at a city council meeting under a bogus name. And some of you continue to offer apologetics for this guy. Good luck with that.

Kyrie was finally reinstated by Brooklyn in December — effectively a reward for his selfish behavior — and he immediately proceeded to test positive for COVID. If you didn’t see that coming, you’re a bigger idiot than Irving. Because James Harden (also in health and safety protocols) hasn’t been James Harden this year, and the Nets are now desperate, Kyrie will be welcomed back to a team that now realizes the transience of its window for winning a championship. The Nets have done a 180 on Irving’s status to salvage a chance at a ring.

Kyrie Irving is a condescending, self-aggrandizing, entitled person who cares about himself and nothing more. He’s the type of person to throw rocks, then hide his hands when he’s caught and act like he doesn’t know what happened. Irving says disparaging things publicly, then gets upset when the media does its job and reports what he said. He’s labeled the media a gang of “pawns,” then, on brand, played the victim once called on it.

The lesson here, children? Stop trusting and hanging onto every word blathered by someone like Kyrie. Yes, he does great charity work, and that is awesome, but then he acts like an ass and expects the world to just accept it because, as a great basketball player, he’s had his ego stroked for much of his existence. People say Irving is brilliant, and that may be true in other ways, but Kyrie still has a lot to learn about life in general. The Earth, which is round, doesn’t revolve around him or anyone else. Until he understands that, there will always be something with Kyrie as long as he’s in the public spotlight.

Sage Steele loves three things: pissing off Black people, letting white people play in her hair, and finding ways to outdo herself.

After a year in which she ran to the Wall Street Journal alleging that that two of her fellow Black colleagues, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, worked to keep her from taking part in a special, called Time for Change: We Won’t Be Defeated, trying to get them fired or their reputations damaged, Steele wound up getting demoted to the 12:00 p.m. SportsCenter while she was replaced by the person she tried to get fired — Duncan — on the 6:00 p.m. telecast.

But, instead of taking her 2020 0-2 record on the chin, the University of Indiana alum went full Bobby Knight mode and gave it her all in 2021.

First, she teamed up with Clay Travis on Twitter and did the whole “well, what about Chicago?” thing — as they implied that the Black city was more dangerous than COVID-19.

Like clockwork, Steele’s racist knight in shining prejudicial armor showed up to defend her.

“Let’s also keep in mind, guys, she got COVID. Not only did she have to get the Covid vaccine but then she had one of these breakthrough cases of COVID which seem to be occurring at a fairly regular rate,” said Travis. “Dr. Fauci says they don’t track them. I think a lot of people listening now who know someone in their own friend or family circle who had this happen to them. The reality is Jemele Hill, when she was working at ESPN called Donald Trump a white supremacist and nothing happened. ESPN didn’t do anything. Steele is getting suspended for saying she doesn’t think the company should have a vaccine mandate? That’s absolute madness.”

Then, she went on Jay Cutler’s podcast and publicly complained about ESPN’s vaccine mandate. Cutler also called her “The Candace Owens of ESPN,” something our Carron Phillips had already dubbed her in 2020.

And finally, Steele wound up missing weeks of work because she tested positive for COVID, because of course she did.

We can’t wait to see what Sage has in store for us in 2023.

In 2021, following the franchise’s worst performance in it’s 26-year history, the Jacksonville Jaguars finally got serious. They used that No. 1 overall draft pick on quarterback Trevor Lawrence, and got rid of coach Doug Marrone, who took them to an AFC Championship game in 2018. Owner Shad Khan went for a big name to replace him — college football coaching legend Urban Meyer. Great name to go with the marquee draft pick, except the Khans made a gigantic mistake. For a rookie effort on a subpar team, Lawrence was fine, but with Meyer they forgot the one rule of capitalism: unsuccessful organizations can’t align themselves with rotten people.

There are plenty of rotten people doing well in America. The people who run the prison-industrial complex, the banking industry, which in the 2020s is still getting sued for discrimination, and hell, the way it’s looking now, Donald Trump might become the only president besides Grover Cleveland to get voted out after a first term and then win again four years later.

Meyer is not the most rotten person in America, but that’s like saying fudge is sweeter than ice cream — both can still ruin your teeth. He had the job of his dreams at Ohio State, but had to step down. Why? Because he rehired a domestic abuser from his days at Florida.

Perhaps three years after that fiasco, perhaps Meyer, as a 57-year-old man, had learned his lesson. It quickly became clear that was not the case, though, as the Urban era began in Duval. He hired a strength coach who had been fired from Iowa — where he was the highest-paid strength coach in America — after he was accused of making racist statements against his players. Meyer, a leader of professionals, decided to hire that person. Chris Doyle resigned less than 48 hours after signing on with the team in February.

Instead of humbling himself and trying to coach the Jaguars in a way to build some credibility, he proceeded to run his team in a way that mirrored a saying from the great philosopher Eric Cartman: “Whatever, I’ll do what I want.”

Meyer brought in Tim Tebow of ESPN and minor league baseball fame to play tight end, a position he’d never played before. Remember watching Tebow try to block in the preseason? College basketball players converting to tight end have struggled while learning to block, but yikes. Also, they can high point footballs in the end zone, which can help negate blocking struggles.

Before the regular season, to help Meyer make decisions on cuts, he brought in a system with him from his college days called “winners and losers.” This evaluation process charts how many times a player wins and loses in one-on-one drills, a record Meyer would then factor into his cut-making process, just like how he organized his depth chart in college.

Meyer’s logic behind this: “I believe in, ‘what’s your record?’” he told ESPN’s Michael DiRocco. “Every man’s got a record. What is it? You are what your record [is]. If you lose a lot but you have a lot of potential, that’s not real good.

“Just over the course of my career, I can give you example after example [of players who] maybe they’re a little slow, but they just never lose.”

Yeah, every red flag was there, but the Khans were pot committed. They couldn’t fire this loon before the season started, so they simply had to hope Meyer would adjust to the game and not be such a dope.

We all know how that worked out. Not flying back with the team out of Ohio, getting photographed while appearing intoxicated and a woman who’s not his wife dancing in his lap, dry snitching on his quarterback to defend himself, berating coaches, kicking kickers, and just overall taking absolutely no inventory of himself nor his actions.

From Day 1 in Jacksonville, Meyer approached the job like Joe Clark in Lean on Me with a baseball bat. Except in that movie, Clark eventually learned that pissing off an entire town is not the best way to repair a bad organization. Meyer brought out so much ill will in Jacksonville that even though the Jaguars have doubled their win total from last year with three games remaining, Meyer didn’t even make it to Week 15.

I hope all you aspiring capitalists out there learned a valuable lesson from the Khan family’s mistake. If your organization is in a bad place, that’s not the time to put a rotten person in a leadership position, no matter how successful that person has been in the past. Your organization isn’t strong enough to handle a person like that, and you’ll find yourself in a position where your organization is even more embarrassing than it was immediately following a 1-15 season.

It takes a lot for a hockey organization to be bigger idiots than the Montreal Canadiens, who knowingly drafted convicted sex offender Logan Maillot and apparently can’t find someone capable of giving rudimentary language tips en français.

But the Chicago hockey team is up to the task. The club with the racist logo and team name covered up a sexual abuse scandal involving video coach Brad Aldrich during a Stanley Cup run in 2011, with coach Joel Quenneville and team GM Stan Bowman deciding that sports was more important. The franchise all but doxxed the victim after the results of its investigation were released.

As Deadspin’s own Jesse Spector eloquently put it:

Not that Quenneville and (former assistant GM Ken) Cheveldayoff shouldn’t go down over this — they should. It’s just that the Chicago franchise should’ve been burned to the ground over this, and the earth salted where the United Center once stood.

Kyle Beach bravely came forward to say he was a victim. While most players on the team denied knowing about the situation, stories of players taunting Beach blow up that lie. The team, of course, did what NHL teams do, which is try to make these things disappear while victim blaming. Beach, a former first-round pick, never did get into an NHL game. Aldrich was able to go on to get a job coaching youth, and he assaulted a child. All this in the name of winning hockey games. Aldrich even got a day with the Stanley Cup!

Quenneville did go down, and Bowman did, too. Cheveldayoff is still the GM of the Winnipeg Jets. Jonathan Toews, still team captain, and ever problematic superstar Patrick Kane (with his own past sexual assault allegations) came out to defend Bowman and Quenneville and team officials.

Given the accusations in Kane’s past, his comment that Bowman “did a lot for me” seem troubling at best:

“I knew Stan very well. I knew him as a great man. He did a lot for me personally, coming into the league and over the course of my career, I’m sure he would’ve handled things a little bit differently nowadays.”

Yikes.

It doesn’t end with the Chicago hockey team, as NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA President Donald Fehr also appear complicit in trying to make the whole thing go away.

Though this honor used to be named after Trevor Bauer, it’s obvious that he’s an odd fit here. Not that he isn’t a world-class moron — he most definitely is, and he was able to just fool enough people by never shutting the fuck up that they labeled him “quirky” or “different.” This list is supposed to be full of people who accomplished things or became entities we could just laugh at. A town fool kind of thing. Bauer is clearly much more than that. He is dangerous. But then, he always has been.

We already knew that there was perhaps no human on Earth more up his own ass than Bauer. And thanks to the baseball’s media fascination with anyone (as long as they’re white) or anything that doesn’t just spout the normal cliches, no matter how toxic or stupid, Bauer was given all the oxygen he could possibly consume to get even more up his own ass. He could feed on himself unchecked. Even while it was clear that no one who played with Bauer could stand him, and more and more stories got out about how pretty much everyone hated him, broadcasters and writers couldn’t wait to tell us just how “interesting” he was because he built his own pitching lab or used “spin rate” in a sentence.

While Bauer wasn’t wrong about pitchers using foreign substances to increase spin rate, when he blatantly and nakedly started using them himself right before becoming a free agent, it was clearly the actions of someone who never even thought about consequences. Why would he, given the general fawning coverage he would get?

And being handed $40 million a year by the Dodgers certainly wouldn’t have dented his sense of self at all. Losing any sense of self-awareness and being constantly fed doesn’t lead one to have a ton of caring about others.

And we’ve known that Bauer thought of women as nothing more than trinkets for a while too. He couldn’t be more obvious if he just walked around with a flashing neon sash that said, “SOCIOPATH.” It was all there. So for him to allegedly violate a woman (or two) for his own pleasure really isn’t that huge of a shock, even if the details are horrifying. Bauer is a monster, and he was one in plain sight.

Perhaps it’s an indication of the uselessness or problems with MLB’s domestic violence policy that only Bauer may never play again after facing charges, whether he goes to trial or not. He had to be this much of a raging asshole that his teammates and employers want nothing to do with him and no other team could justify signing him (for now). This is what it takes to make crimes like these alleged ones to stick to a player to end his career. Which should happen more often, as we know.

We can’t laugh at Trevor Bauer, and he’ll still be rich however this all shakes out. All we can do is shake our heads at how readily he was promoted and protected, and how much of his success is a reflection of society as a whole.

Aaron Rodgers was really good as a Jeopardy! guest host this year, and even though he didn’t get the job, the Packers quarterback still looked like he might have a future in television once he’s done playing.

Unfortunately, John Cena already beat Rodgers to the new version of Jeff Foxworthy’s old game show, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

After putting all of his teammates in jeopardy, Rodgers it turns out, is not smarter than a fifth grader. Or a third grader. Or a first grader. Even young children know that when it comes to getting vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, if you have questions, the person to ask is a doctor and not Joe Rogan.

There is nothing idiotic about getting infected with COVID-19. You can get vaccinated, wear a mask, regularly wash your hands, and still get the virus. Not taking those precautions, however, is idiotic, both because of the enhanced risk of catching the bug and because of the higher chance of severe outcomes for the unvaccinated.

Rodgers, thankfully, was able to avoid serious illness, and only missed one game after his “alternative treatment” plan did not prevent him from getting SARS-CoV-2. Unfortunately, he learned nothing from his experience, and not only continued to tout horse deworming medication as a way to treat COVID (it isn’t), but whined that the “media is trying to shame and cancel us unvaccinated people.”

He’s partially right about that. The media has tried to shame the unvaccinated by pointing out that it’s a selfish decision that puts everyone around you at a higher risk of catching a deadly virus. And the media has tried to cancel the unvaccinated by getting them to get vaccinated and protect themselves and everyone around them from the deadly virus.

All of this is plenty dumb, but what really makes Rodgers the poster boy of covidiocy is that he’s a big fat liar. Because he thought he could get away with it, Rodgers had answered a question about his vaccination status in August by saying that he was “immunized.” That was a lie. So, all of that time, for three months until he tested positive and his spot got blown up, Rodgers was running around and breaking NFL protocol rules, not only risking his own health, but everyone he came in contact with.

Rodgers’ claims of an allergy to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may have been real. His skepticism of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may have been at least somewhat valid, as the other shots have proven more effective. None of that should have stopped him from telling the truth instead of trying to play footsie with it by saying he was “immunized,” which he absolutely was not.

Do you know how big of an idiot you have to be to make Tom Brady the voice of reason about what to put in your body? Deadspin’s No. 2 IDIOT OF THE YEAR level, that’s how big. And that’s what Rodgers is.

Do you ever wonder if Hillary Clinton sent Jon Gruden a “thank you” note? Because before this year, she was the face of an email scandal — until Gruden told the woman who should have been the rightful 45th president to “hold his beer.”

The former Las Vegas Raiders coach proved once and for all just how great mediocre white men have it in this world when the guy in the midst of a 10-year, $100 million deal — with a winning percentage barely over .500 — was outed as a being a member of the hateful trinity as his emails from 2011 (when he was a TV analyst) proved that he despises Black people, women, and the LGBTQ community.

Gruden said NFLPA President DeMaurice Smith had “lips the size of Michelin tires.” He actually tried to claim that one wasn’t racist, he didn’t “have a have a racist bone” in his body. He used homophobic slurs to describe NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell as well as openly gay draftee Michael Sam, who never made a team. (Gruden was the coach of Carl Nassib in Las Vegas, the league’s first openly gay player.) He also mocked the league using female referees and criticized Eric Reid and (who remains blackballed by the league) for the Colin Kaepernick kneeling movement.

And let’s not forget that Gruden is also why the Raiders all but broke the Rooney Rule when Mark Davis basically admitted to hiring Gruden before he fired Jack Del Rio. With Gruden in place, the Raiders hired Mike Mayock to be their general manager, a guy with no prior front office experience before he got the job — and who once said he’d take Blaine Gabbert over Cam Newton when he was a draft analyst on NFL Network.

Gruden has already filed a lawsuit against the league alleging “character assignation.”

“There is no explanation or justification for why Gruden’s emails were the only ones made public out of the 650,000 emails collected in the N.F.L.’s investigation of the Washington Football Team or for why the emails were held for months before being released in the middle of the Raiders’ season,” Adam Hosmer-Henner, one of Gruden’s lawyers, said in a statement.

Gruden had to go, but he’s also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the NFL’s corruption. Because until Dan Snyder is removed in Washington and the emails about Colin Kaepernick are released, Gruden will be viewed as the lone bad apple instead of the fallen fruit from a toxic tree planted in a contaminated orchard.

If the NFL exposed Gruden to distract from something worse going on in Washington, the league could have the inside track on the 2022 Idiot of the Year.