Shannon Sharpe compares Caitlin Clark to Pat McAfee as a pioneer

In what marked perhaps the worst kept secret in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark was named the league’s 2024 Rookie of the Year on Thursday.

Yet despite receiving 66 first-place votes for the award, most of the focus has been on the one first-place vote Clark didn’t receive, which went to Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese.

As he has done plenty of times recently, Shannon Sharpe came to the Indiana Fever star guard’s defense on his Nightcap podcast, agreeing with co-host Chad Johnson that whoever voted for Reese over Clark did so due to a personal vendetta against the latter. The Hall of Fame tight end proceeded to make an unlikely comparison to illustrate his belief that Clark’s is being held against her for reasons he can’t understand, invoking Pat McAfee’s role as a podcasting pioneer.

“Man, I am so happy for ‘payback’ Pat McAfee,” Sharpe said. “Because what he did is to show what could be done, what is possible. Why would I ever be mad at that? He did it, I could do it too. That’s how I look at something. I don’t begrudge — ‘Oh, he getting all, he getting all the credit. Man, P-Mac wasn’t the first one to have no podcast. He ain’t blah blah.’ No. Get that money, P-Mac. Oh, so somebody really do got that kind of money to pay? Let me get some of it then. Let me find out a way. Let me huddle my team… ‘OK, this is what he did and parlayed it into that.’

“I ain’t look at it like, ‘Oh, there were so many Black people that had podcasts before P-Mac.’ All I know is that what he did is that he opened it up and let you see what could be possible digitally for an athlete… boy, when I saw that, I was like, ‘whoa. He got what?!’

Sharpe then paused dramatically for emphasis.

“It’s been done once, it could be done again. More than one person has climbed Mount Everest. More than one person has broke the sub-four-minute mile. They done put more than one person on the moon. More than one person went to the moon. That’s the way I look at it.”

Although it remains unclear who voted for Reese over Clark and why, Sharpe’s point appears to be more directed toward the general idea that the former Iowa star has been subjected to jealously from the WNBA’s “old guard” since entering the league earlier this year.

And while that conversation is perhaps more nuanced than what Sharpe laid out, his comparison to McAfee as a podcasting pioneer is certainly an interesting one that will — if nothing else — surely be appreciated by the former All-Pro punter.

[Nightcap]