Sarah Spain hammers Christine Brennan for ‘dereliction of duties as a journalist’ over Caitlin Clark

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Credit: Reuters Connect; Katie Couric on YouTube; Sarah Spain on LinkedIn

Since Caitlin Clark entered the pros and helped generate a massive surge in interest and investment in the WNBA, famed sports reporter Christine Brennan has been one of Clark’s fiercest advocates in the media, even writing a biography of her last year.

But Brennan has also frustrated players around the league with her fixation on Clark and occasionally drawn the ire of her colleagues in journalism for exaggerating Clark’s centrality to certain stories.

After Brennan got into a personal disagreement with players on the Connecticut Sun around Clark’s matchup with the team in the 2024 postseason, veteran commentator Sarah Spain invited Brennan onto her podcast for a discussion. In the interview, Brennan defended her record of women’s sports coverage as pioneering in the industry and said too much was being made of her coverage of Clark.

Coming off another hectic week that ended with a one-game suspension for Phoenix center Alyssa Thomas for striking Clark in the throat during a loose-ball situation on Wednesday night, Brennan tapped into some familiar talking points in a column about the incident. The columnist argued in USA Today that commissioner Cathy Engelbert has failed to “give Clark her due and keep her safe,” while claiming, as evidence of Clark’s need for such treatment, the fact that Brennan used to get “laughed at” during the early days of the WNBA when she would bring it up to male colleagues.

In a video posted to LinkedIn on Monday, Spain offered a scathing rebuttal, essentially repeating a line from their previous podcast discussion, accusing Brennan of “dereliction of duties as a journalist.”

“We would never say the ‘NBA hates’ fill-in-the-blank,” Spain said. “That’s describing every single player in the league as having that opinion and being a part of an agenda. She does that all the time with the WNBA, and it is frankly dereliction of duties as a journalist.”

Spain also took issue with Brennan’s claims about the league’s early days.

“Nineties WNBA games, the first couple years, still have some attendance and viewership records. It was not nothing,” Spain said. “It was sunk, at one point, with intention from certain executives, and it struggled with highs and lows. But the WNBA has had moments well before Caitlin Clark that were giant, that were huge, that could have been capitalized on if the same investment and coverage and streaming services and money and everything else was where it is now.

“So to presume that this never could have happened with a different player who had arrived at this very time is, to me, to intentionally erase decades of talent, of star power, and so many women who came before and helped bring us to where we are now, in service of being able to continue this narrative that Caitlin is being done wrong.”


In the column, Brennan presages these critiques, writing:

“These facts make some longtime WNBA players, reporters and fans (especially those from UConn) mad, even sad. I understand they wish a player like Maya Moore, Clark’s favorite growing up, would have been so famous that everyone — sports fan or not — knew her name, as they do with Clark. I wish it happened too. But it didn’t. Do they want the small thing to stay small forever?”

Brennan also cites statistics referencing other active stars who do not regularly draw the same audience or attendance as Clark has since her first game as a pro.

However, Spain supposes that Brennan is less genuine in her focus on Clark, claiming that she is only making arguments about protecting and supporting the Indiana Fever phenom to sell more copies of her book.

“I’ve had people ask me what Christine’s intent is with all of this riding for Caitlin, with the relentless tweeting and posting and opinion piece-writing about how the league is doing Caitlin wrong and she should spin off and start her own league … and I don’t know,” Spain said. “I have to assume that that’s why she keeps writing these pieces and keeps inserting the book’s title. That is the most gracious excuse I can give … for her singular focus on one player, and not on the league.”

Clearly, as a trailblazer, Brennan is being held to a high standard by those who wish to see her see the fuller picture of Clark’s situation in the WNBA. However, while Spain appears to wish Brennan simply held a different viewpoint, Brennan’s argument is increasingly common across sports media as Clark is continually involved in verbal and physical confrontations that go viral and make the league look chaotic.

The post Sarah Spain hammers Christine Brennan for ‘dereliction of duties as a journalist’ over Caitlin Clark appeared first on Awful Announcing.

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