Things quickly went from a hard foul to a bigger controversy in the blink of an eye. Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington was ejected after a Flagrant 2 foul on Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham. After leaving, Carrington posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on Threads and tagged the Fever. But her post did not sit well with former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho.

“If we are paying attention to what D.J. Carrington did to Sophie Cunningham, it was not a race-based decision,” Emmanuel Acho said on the Speakeasy podcast. “And to call that a white privilege-based foul is to completely undermine the term of white privilege and to also completely ignore the rules in basketball. You hit her in the head.

“You drew blood. You didn’t connect with the ball at all whatsoever. So to me, it was just very ignorant and, to some degree, asinine by D.J. Carrington to suggest that that call was based on white privilege. Have we seen examples of white players make that same foul and get away with it? Have we seen examples of black players make that same foul and get away with it? Yes. There was no white privilege involved in that specific call.”

Cunningham was trying to score a layup when Carrington hit her on the left side of her head with her arm. Cunningham fell to the floor but quickly stood up and confronted Carrington. Her teammates then stepped in and separated the two players.

The referees first called it a flagrant 1, but upon reviewing, they changed it to a Flagrant 2 foul. That meant Carrington had to leave the game immediately. Before her ejection, Carrington had scored eight points in just four minutes while coming off the bench.

On top of this, this was not the first time Carrington was involved in a physical incident. Last year, in June, while playing against the Los Angeles Sparks, she and rookie Sarah Ashlee Barker fought for a loose ball. Carrington reached up and pulled Barker down by her hair. The referees ruled it a common foul.

The pushback hasn’t stayed confined to the NFL crowd. Seth Curry weighed in too, posting under his verified Threads account, @sdotcurry, needling Carrington for hopping on social media so soon after getting tossed: “Threads from the locker room after the ejection is comedy!”

Skip Bayless went further, saying flatly, “Have to wonder if it was personal.”

Fever coach Stephanie White, for her part, didn’t read anything personal into it. Asked about the foul afterward, she said, “I don’t think that DiJonai intentionally came out to get her across the neck like she did, but it did happen, and I thought it was the right call.”

Carrington has since locked her Threads account, per BrickCenter, after fans began flooding her comment section with criticism.

That said, Acho has been circling WNBA storylines for a while now, and not quietly. Back in June, on his Speakeasy podcast, he argued the league would actually be better off without Caitlin Clark, calling her “a bigger distraction than she is an additive” and saying the WNBA no longer needed her the way it once did.

He came back to Clark again after a play involving Chelsea Gray, suggesting she “acted soft”. So this isn’t a one-off. Acho has made a habit of wading into WNBA’s most heated moments.