A WNBA star broke the athlete consensus on the Novig ad
Sophie Cunningham did not defend Sydney Sweeney’s betting spot. She rejected the outrage around it. Those are different positions, and both sides flattened hers into a headline.
For a week the athlete story around Sydney Sweeney’s Novig ad had one shape: Olympians and pros lining up to condemn a nude betting spot that claimed to be about sports. Then Sophie Cunningham, a guard for the Indiana Fever, sat down on her own podcast and refused to read from either script. The headlines that followed made her a defender of the ad. That is not what she said.
What she actually said
On her show No Hesitation, co-hosted with the trainer Drew Hanlen, Cunningham did question the pile-on in plain terms: it is a gambling ad, and drawing attention is the entire point, so why is anyone surprised. But in the same breath she took the ad apart. She asked whether Sweeney even bets on sports and called the spot, in her word, inauthentic. She said that morally she found it kind of weird, then landed on a shrug: to each their own, go do your thing. A defence does not usually include the phrase "so inauthentic."
At a glance
- Who
- Sophie Cunningham, guard, Indiana Fever
- Where
- Her podcast, No Hesitation with Drew Hanlen
- Her actual take
- Dislikes the ad ("inauthentic"), rejects the outrage
- The distortion
- Framed as defending Sweeney by one side, damning critics by the other
Two camps, one flattening
What happened next is the tell. Outlets that had been cataloguing the backlash framed Cunningham as breaking ranks to back Sweeney. Outlets on the other side framed her as the one honest woman calling out fake outrage. Both needed her to pick a team. She did not. Her position, read whole, is that she dislikes the ad and also thinks the anger aimed at Sweeney is misplaced. You can hold both. Most of the coverage could not.
Why this matters more than one podcast take
The value of Cunningham’s comments is that they puncture the idea of an "athlete consensus" against the ad. There was never a single athlete position, only the loudest one. When a WNBA player whose whole appeal is bluntness says the outrage is overcooked while the ad is still cheap, that is the most clear-eyed thing anyone in the cycle has offered. It also complicates our own earlier framing on this site, that athletes keep hitting back and the pushback is now the story. That was true of the athletes who spoke first. It was never the whole roster.
What to watch
Whether more athletes follow Cunningham into the middle, neither cheering the ad nor performing anger about it, or whether the story stays a two-sided fight that keeps the Novig name in circulation. Every quote about the ad, hers included, is still free reach for the campaign. That has not changed no matter which camp claims the speaker.
