So how did it become normal for sports journalists to be covering politics?

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In early July, as protests roiled the United States, Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler sent a note of reprimand to a few of her employees.

Loeffler is one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. Congress. Before getting into politics, she did what a lot of super-rich, ambitious people with healthy egos do these days – she got into sports. Loeffler bought herself a stake in the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream.

“I strongly credit my own professional success to the lessons in leadership and character that sports taught me at an early age,” she said at the time.

As it turns out, sports still had a few lessons to teach her.

Loeffler entered Congress in 2019 as a proxy for U.S. President Donald Trump. That did not exactly endear her to her players.

When the WNBA announced it would support the Black Lives Matter movement through on-court displays last summer, Loeffler sent a letter to the league office: “The truth is we need less – not more politics in sports.”

At that point, Loeffler held a double-digit polling lead over her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, in an election that was still six months away.

Hours later, the Atlanta Dream players took the court wearing the preferred bullhorn of modern pros – a custom T-shirt. It read, “VOTE WARNOCK.”

All of a sudden, people who knew little and cared nothing for Georgia politics knew who Kelly Loeffler was.

Loeffler lost that election on Tuesday by roughly the amount of voters you could fit into a couple of Dream home games. She had her biggest national moment on Wednesday, rising after the storming of the Capitol to declare surrender in the attempt to overturn the election in Trump’s favour.

It would be fun if you could draw a straight line between the Dream’s protest and Loeffler’s implosion. Then we could all sub-contract our political conscience to the smartest sounding head of hair on TSN.

Such as, what does Sidney Crosby think about my local city councillor? I love the guy, but if Sidney has some negative input to share, I’m fully ready to torpedo him. Penguins forever!

No athlete or any other public figure can bring down a politician, because politicians have proved amazingly adept at bringing themselves down. It’s their greatest talent.

What athletes have suddenly become aware of is their ability to focus the wider public’s flea-like attention span on a particular issue or person, often with a strong hint of righteous fury.

Much has been made recently of the rabbit hole that is right-wing media in the United States. You get into that content quicksand and it is hard to get out.

The avowed Fox News viewer is not switching back and forth between that and PBS. But there is at least one other channel he probably watches occasionally: ESPN. Sports cable is the fifth column in the wackier parts of the U.S. conservative movement.

What’s changed in the past year is not that players have begun to embrace their pulpits as ways to promote causes they support. They always have done that. They’ve run a gamut from Carlos Delgado’s anthem protest while he was a member of the Toronto Blue Jays to the various charities every player pumps up. Players have always been willing to leverage their fame for good or personal profit or both. But for the most part, people didn’t care.

What’s changed is the media system around the players. Twenty-five years ago, you’d have been hard-pressed to find more than a handful of people in sports who’d have taken issue with Loeffler’s sentiment re: sports and politics. She’d have been seen as the reasonable person in this debate.

Back then, Charles Barkley became a cult hero (and got much richer) after announcing “I am not a role model,” on behalf of Nike sneakers.

This purely marketing concept was presented as radically transgressive, as though Barkley were the first brave patriot fighting back against the Role Model Industrial Complex. The barrier to entry for iconoclasts was low – all you needed was some profile and a bit of a snarl.

But as the screamers took over sports radio and 24-hour cable TV through the early 2000s, it got harder to shock and amuse people. Highlights no longer cut it as ratings bait. The internet killed the game story. What was needed was conflict, particularly of the off-court sort.

Sports media increasingly gave itself over to stirring up, documenting and then critiquing whatever conflict it could find. Old norms about leaving players’ personal lives alone crumbled. Suddenly, everything the third-string quarterback ever said, did or posted was fair game for lacerating debate.

That’s how an institution created to coddle and lionize the players became instead a fractious partner with them in producing a daily soap opera. Some leagues and media outlets did it better than others. They’re the ones thriving now.

This rising tide floated all boats. Sports and sports media grew at a racing clip, mutually reinforcing one another while pretending to act as a check. Then an existential threat showed up – Trump.

At first, Trump was a sports guy. He had a lot of support in sports, especially among club owners. Remember the MAGA hat in Tom Brady’s locker? Of course you don’t. The NFL just launched a satellite that’s erasing that memory from every living person’s brain.

It wasn’t Trump’s politics that turned the decision makers against him. It was his inability to stay in his own lane. Almost from the outset of his presidency, he used sports figures and sports controversies as tribal drums, beating up indiscriminately on players, leagues and owners.

That was a mistake on Trump’s part and a boon for sports. Now they had an external enemy to fight against.

This enemy was already hated by their most prized demographic – middle-class coastal kids whose peak merchandise-purchasing days are still ahead of them. And they had a coalition partner to help them do the fighting: the media.

Sports started picking the fights, and the media amplified them. Did anyone care that the Atlanta Dream players disliked their boss? Maybe. It’s a good bit of workplace conflict. But without any bold-face names on either side of it, the story doesn’t have legs.

So the sports media picked up the story, threw it across their multiplatform back and ran with it for weeks. Unless you wanted to give up entirely on ESPN or watching the basketball game, the coverage was unavoidable.

Fox News was doing its bit for Loeffler & Co., while Fox Sports worked the opposite angle. The only thing these two media siblings have in common is a profit motive, and that’s all they need to stay friendly.

This formula works coming and going. On Friday morning, the big talker in sports media was former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling voicing his support for the storming of the Capitol. The story was being disseminated and discussed as though it was the president of China who’d said it.

Why should we care what a baseball player thinks about anything? We shouldn’t. And we do. Ad buyers have wedged themselves into the space between the two.

Now we’re at the point where LeBron James is referring to the incoming administration as “Joe and Kamala” and musing about buying the Atlanta Dream himself. America’s got a lot of problems that require radical thinking, but I’m not sure creating a new cohort of robber barons is the answer.

As always, when you’re looking for where things are headed, follow the money. It knows.

So did the Dream cost Kelly Loeffler her seat in the U.S. Senate? Yes and no. The team did, but not precisely in the way that’s being claimed, and not without a great deal of help from its self-interested allies in the sports press.