Jemele Hill and Cari Champion Want to Take Kid Gloves Off Women’s Sports Coverage

Many in the media handle women’s sports delicately.

Competitors have to get along. Coaches can do no wrong. If a critique is provided, it has to be shared with a side of sugar.

Jemele Hill and Cari Champion want their new women’s sports talk show, Flagrant and Funny, to be a corrective to that.

“If I have an issue with LeBron, I should be able to say the same thing about A’ja Wilson,” Champion told FOS. “If I don’t like the way JJ Redick is coaching my Lakers, I should be able to also say something about Becky Hammon.”

They say they just want women’s leagues to be covered like anything else in sports.

“I would love it if these players honestly talked about other players the way they do in male leagues,” Champion said. “The reason why they can’t do that is because there is this rule in which women have to be socialized in a certain way. They have to get along.” 

Their iHeart Women’s Sports podcast, which debuts Wednesday afternoon, will be the duo’s third show together after projects on Vice TV and CNN+.

The plan is for a debate-driven show airing Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with occasional guest appearances. 

The top three sports podcasts on iHeart, according to the platform’s website, are sports shows hosted by men: The Herd with Colin Cowherd, The Bill Simmons Podcast, and Pardon My Take. Nos. 4 and 5 are Fudd Around and Find Out with UConn guard Azzi Fudd and Good Game with Sarah Spain. 

Fudd’s show is one of many athlete-hosted podcasts; Spain’s is a daily interview show. In other words, there’s an opening for a talk show. 

“One thing we have seen very prominent in sports culture—and I’m not saying this in a negative way—there is a broey-ness that is happening that a lot of executives in decision making positions feel like needs to be highlighted,” Hill told FOS. “What you don’t see is women. It looks different, it sounds different but we can give each other shit just as much as men do. We can comment, do and say things that drive conversation just as much as guys can.”

“Women belong in the conversation that presently when you look at the entities that are building sports programming we are not invited.” 

The pair wants to bring both the bravado that is usually reserved for men’s sports with the expert nuance that they think the major network talk shows haven’t brought to their women’s sports coverage.

Over the next couple of weeks Champion and Hill will be taping episodes in person in New York before heading to Super Bowl LX for radio row. After San Francisco, the show will go virtual but both Champion and Hill plan to be at major sporting events like the Final Four and WNBA games—if the league and union can reach a deal on a new CBA. 

“Depending on what day it is you’ll determine who is the flagrant one or the funny one,” Champion said.