The Indiana Fever’s 2026 season run has come to an end; however, the noise around Sophie Cunningham is still not showing any signs of fading. Recently, The Athletic reporter Candace Buckner published an article arguing that the Fever should move on from the 30-year-old because of the kind of attention she brings to the team. But that did not sit right with Fox analyst and OutKick founder Clay Travis, who believes the criticism exposes a glaring double standard in the way sports media treats athletes who bring politics into sports.

Cunningham has certainly generated a lot of headlines this season. Her comments about the inclusion of transgender athletes in the sport sparked widespread debate, which still hasn’t slowed down. And more recently, she found herself back in the spotlight after she criticized A’ja Wilson’s confrontation with a Fever fan during the playoffs. Yet Travis believes there is an important distinction being overlooked: the Fever guard has largely kept those opinions away from the court.

“Left wing sports media told us Kaepernick was a hero for kneeling during the anthem & demanded he get jobs even though his political opinions had nothing to do with sports. Now Sophie Cunningham must be fired for speaking on sports eligibility. Hypocrites!” Travis wrote on X.

He said on The Clay Travis Show, “Now, this is really important, and it’s nuanced, so I want you guys to follow me along here. Their argument for Colin Kaepernick is he should be employed. It’s their argument for the last decade, despite the fact that he made political opinions of his directly transferable to the court in uniform at work.

“When he refused to stand for the national anthem, he was making his politics completely intertwined with the sport itself.

“Sophie Cunningham, in uniform at work, has made no political statements at all during the course of games. She said in an ESPN interview that she believed men didn’t belong in women’s sports. She then did a take there. She has a podcast, where she said, ‘Hey, if we want to be bigger as a sport, we have to appeal to a larger audience, and sometimes that audience is going to be mean, and they might say unkind things to us, and we have to suck it up and handle it,'” he further added.

“She’s trying to grow the sport by appealing to a larger audience in directly-related-to-the-sport issues… If Sophie Cunningham started refusing to stand for the national anthem because she didn’t want men in women’s sports, I would say, ‘You know what, I don’t think that’s the right way to handle it.’ I would be consistent.”

Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, became a free agent after the 2016 season following his decision to protest racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. He was never signed by another NFL team, while several media outlets continued to argue that he deserved another opportunity in the league.

The key distinction for Travis, however, is that Kaepernick brought his political protest directly into an NFL game by refusing to stand for the anthem. Cunningham, meanwhile, made her comments away from the court while discussing an issue she believed affected women’s sports. She did not turn those views into a protest during a WNBA game, yet the backlash surrounding her comments has now become part of the argument for why the Fever should move on from her. That contrast is exactly where Travis believes the media’s standards become inconsistent.

Buckner’s argument, however, goes beyond simply questioning Sophie Cunningham’s right to express her opinions. Her concern is what those opinions have brought to a Fever team that already finds itself under an enormous spotlight because of Caitlin Clark.

Her comments repeatedly pulled attention away from basketball and toward debates surrounding politics, culture, and women’s sport. And that is why Buckner believes the Fever may be better off moving in a different direction. Buckner argued that Cunningham has become “too turbulent to be paired with Caitlin Clark,” pointing to the growing attention around the guard and the way it has followed the Fever.

“If the Fever ever want to go back to being a basketball team again and follow the lead of rivals openly clashing with the forces trying to hijack their league, then Cunningham has to go,” she wrote in her column.

At the heart of the debate is a simple question: should off-court opinions determine an athlete’s place on the roster? Travis believes Cunningham has been held to a different standard, while Buckner sees the attention surrounding her as a problem the Fever can no longer ignore. So with the season over, should Indiana move on from Sophie Cunningham? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.