Title IX legislation was passed in 1972 to provide more opportunities for girls and women and educational institutions and to address the problem of discrimination against female students. It covers academic programs as well as athletic programs and there is an evaluation criterion to confirm whether a university or college is complying. Title IX also has had an effect on the business side of college sports because it means that most institutions needed to add women athletes at a higher rate than men to their athletic programs in order to meet certain standards. Title IX means that new women’s non-revenue sport programs have started to reallocate funding to women’s teams. Also, sports programs that had football teams would have to add about four- or five more-women’s non-revenue teams to counteract the football participants. While people argue about Title IX’s equality in terms of eliminating men’s collegiate programs, it attempts to create equal opportunities for women in sport in terms of proportionality of the women attending the college.

Title IX has been effective in securing equal opportunities for women in sport as it has had an impact in the collegiate scholarship opportunities for women in sport. It has also increased the visibility of women in sport to a higher level than it was previously. Obviously, this has led to more sponsorships and media exposure for current women’s sports leagues such as the WNBA and the LPGA. The improved media coverage of other women’s sports including softball and women’s soccer has led to female athletes including soccer star Trinity Rodman becoming role models for young female athletes growing up today.

Understandably, a lot of the focus of the Protect College Sports Act centers on major college football, which is the most significant revenue generator of college sports. There is also concern with the Protect College Sports Act regarding how Title IX would be affected. The AFL-CIO and the AFL-CIO Sports Council, which represents athlete workers across professional sports leagues, opposed the Protect College Sports Act with one of the issues being that “Title IX and the hard-fought progress for women athletes is undermined by locking in compliance standards at a level that does not sufficiently address gender discrimination.” The confluence of college sports and political meetings will continue.

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

Prosecutors allege Love, 35, spent more than four years pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. A second identity ran alongside it, that of a wealthy real estate investor. The scheme was not a solo act, either. Taylor Jamie Chan, who was 18 at the time of his arrest, allegedly posed as Love’s personal financial adviser. Together the two are accused of pulling roughly $1.3 million from at least 26 women, most of them met on dating apps. The FBI picked up both at the Boise Airport on August 24, 2026. They face charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, though neither man has been convicted, and both remain presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Read the affidavit anyway. What jumps out goes well past a lone accused hustler. You start to see how our culture got trained to skip the hard question.

Here is what I mean. Love did not walk into a bank and forge documents in front of a teller. According to the affidavit, he built a persona online. His Instagram bio reportedly read like the genuine article, undrafted wideout, team hashtag and all. His feed showed him in team gear, working out on a beach in a helmet, posing next to exotic cars. Somewhere out there sits footage from 2024 where he appears to sign what he called an NFL contract, and when somebody asked which team, he answered “Niners.” Representatives for both the league and the 49ers later told the FBI he had never worked a single day for either.

None of that stopped the story from spreading. Court papers note something that genuinely rattled me. Because Love pumped these false claims across social media, search engines and even artificial intelligence tools sometimes repeated the lies as fact. Sit with that. Put a lie in enough places, and the software folks lean on for straight answers starts parroting it back. In 2026, that is not a small footnote. That is the whole warning.

The tools he allegedly used were cheap and ordinary. Prosecutors point to a phone app called Fake Bank Account Pro, which he supposedly used to manufacture screenshots of enormous balances. One fabricated display reportedly topped thirty million dollars. Another put cash beside a fat stack of stocks. In early 2024, court documents note, he asked Chan to whip up a screenshot showing a $3.4 million balance, then returned the following month wanting a stock account that appeared to hold $11 million. These were not vault doors. These were fakes anybody with a smartphone could generate before breakfast.

That is the part I want my people to sit with. None of those images independently proved that the lifestyle, fortune, or professional status he advertised was real. Somebody rents a car for an afternoon and hands the keys back. A weekend in a friend’s condo fills a whole photo roll. Designer clothes are just a purchase. Even enormous account balances sit an app away. All those pictures prove is that he stood near nice things once. Visible wealth proves you have access to a camera and a moment. It does not prove a dime is yours.

The women in this case were not foolish. That framing lets everybody else off the hook. Prosecutors describe a layered operation designed to hand victims what resembled independent confirmation from several directions. There was the man himself, romancing them, talking about building a future together. Then came the supposed adviser vouching for the returns. The fake balances backed it up. Then came the group FaceTime calls where the two allegedly walked women through phony investment gains in real time. When you get the same story from what feels like a few sources, your guard drops. That is human. Con work has always relied on it.

The cruelest detail sits near the end. When some women ran out of cash, Love allegedly told them to take out personal loans, promising quick repayment. Some did. And once a woman had nothing left to give, or started asking too many questions, prosecutors say he simply blocked her and vanished with the money. Investigators interviewed victim after victim, and not one reported getting back a single return or even seeing a legitimate account statement.

So what do we do with a story such as this? We stop letting appearance stand in for proof. That is the whole lesson, and it costs nothing to apply. If a man says he plays pro ball, that is checkable in about ninety seconds. Rosters are public. If somebody is pushing an investment, the account belongs at a real institution you can call, not in a screenshot he controls. Anybody promising fast money with no verifiable trail is telling you exactly who he is, whether you want to hear it or not. Verification is not an insult to a person you care about. It is the baseline respect you owe your own money and your own peace.

I keep coming to how modern this whole thing feels. My generation grew up knowing you had to earn credibility over years, in your neighborhood, among people who watched you show and prove. Now a stranger can manufacture two decades of reputation in an afternoon and beam it to your phone. The platforms reward the flashiest version of somebody, not the truest. And when the algorithm and the search bar start agreeing with the fraud, the ground under all of us shifts.

The FBI believes there may be many more victims who have not yet been identified. If a piece of this rings familiar, the bureau is still taking calls. But the larger point outlives this one case. We are being conditioned, daily, to mistake performance for substance. The antidote is old and unglamorous. Ask the question. Check the receipt. Make the man prove it before you hand over anything that matters.

A lifestyle you can see is not a life you can trust. Somebody had to say it plain.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Let me rewind for the younger brothers who might not know the full weight of what this fighter pulled off. Over two decades in the sport, Floyd Mayweather earned an estimated $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion from his fights. That is not a typo. Billion, with a b. His 2015 night against Manny Pacquiao brought him close to $250 million. Two years later, his bout with Conor McGregor reportedly produced another $275 million. Few athletes have ever squeezed more money out of a single event than this fella did. He built an entire brand off the nickname and sold folks on the notion that watching him get rich was worth the price of admission.

So how is it, then, that the same champ spent the first half of this year tangled up in lawsuits, a federal tax lien, felony charges and public questions about his financial arrangements?

That question sits underneath everything here. At the end of 2025, a lengthy Business Insider investigation reported that Mayweather had borrowed $54 million at roughly 9 percent interest, using 14 homes, his Las Vegas strip club and his jet as collateral. It also reported that two of his commercial properties had been foreclosed and detailed several lawsuits and liens alleging unpaid bills. His attorney denied that Mayweather was experiencing financial strain. That investigation must be kept separate from his defamation case against the publication. Mayweather filed that lawsuit in April 2025 over an earlier story questioning his public claim that he had purchased 62 Upper Manhattan apartment buildings for $402 million. In May 2026, he voluntarily dismissed his claims with prejudice, Business Insider dismissed its counterclaims, and both sides agreed to cover their own costs. No judge ruled on the truth of the underlying reporting. In March, the IRS filed a lien for approximately $7.28 million in unpaid federal taxes from 2018 and 2023. Mayweather also sued Showtime and former Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza, alleging that at least $340 million from his fights was missing or unaccounted for. His complaint claims money was routed into accounts controlled by former manager and adviser Al Haymon, although Haymon was not named as a defendant. Paramount, Showtime’s parent company, rejected the allegations as lacking legal and factual merit. Mayweather and several of his companies later filed another lawsuit accusing Jona Rechnitz, Ayal Frist, Frist Apex Ventures and attorney Alexander Seligson of participating in a scheme involving at least $175 million. Those accusations remain allegations that have not been decided in court.

There is more still. In April, Clark County prosecutors filed two felony charges based on allegations that Mayweather used one $200,000 check to purchase a luxury watch in Las Vegas in December 2024 even though the account lacked sufficient funds. The charges are theft and drawing or passing a check with intent to defraud. Mayweather has not been convicted, and his attorney represented him at a June court appearance. Another hearing was scheduled for September. That still stings. A fighter who once collected purses the size of a small nation’s budget is now defending himself against criminal allegations involving a check that prosecutors say would not clear the bank.

Now I am not sitting here in judgment of a grown man’s ledger. I do not have his books and neither do you. Borrowing against property does not automatically mean a person is broke, and allegations written in a lawsuit do not become facts merely because somebody filed them. Mayweather’s representatives have disputed the idea that he is under financial strain. Still, strip away the speculation and a pattern of complicated debts, tax obligations, disputed payments and questionable advisers remains visible, the kind far too many Black men recognize from our own kitchen tables and the old running buddies who hit a lick and could not hold it.

Bringing in cash and stewarding it are two entirely separate crafts.

The champ mastered that first craft better than nearly anybody who ever entered a boxing ring. Earning was his art. His sense of timing had no equal in the business. Put him across a negotiating table and he read the leverage in a room the way a seasoned preacher reads a restless congregation. Somehow he got the wider world to line up and pay just to watch him get richer. That part deserves its flowers. But the second craft, the quiet and unglamorous work of protecting what you built, lives in a different classroom. The tax code has never once been impressed by footwork. Estate planning will not respond to a shoulder roll. Figuring out where your dollars actually land once they leave your hands is a whole other education, one that means sitting with people who speak a language most of us were never taught at home.

That is the real ache in this story for me. Nobody handed our grandparents a course on trusts, tax planning and lasting protection. Plenty of us grew up in houses where the entire financial lesson amounted to keeping a little something in a coffee can and paying the rent on time. Honorable, sure. Nowhere near sufficient for the kind of figures a Mayweather generates, though. When a person travels from a rough block to a private jet without building the knowledge and oversight needed to understand compound interest, capital gains, debt and asset protection, trouble can arrive quickly even when the checks were enormous.

I want the Black men reading this to hear me clearly. Go and get the education. I do not necessarily mean a four year degree, though Lord knows there is nothing wrong with one. What I am pointing at is the deliberate study of how money behaves once you have some of it in hand. Read the boring material, the pages that make your eyelids heavy. Find yourself an accountant who is not your cousin doing you a favor over the holidays. Learn what a fiduciary actually is and why that title ought to matter to you personally. There sits a genuine difference between an asset that feeds you and a liability dressed up to look like arrival. The chain, the whip, the watch that costs more than somebody’s house, all of it whispers wealth while quietly draining it out the side door.

Here is the piece that troubles me most about this entire affair. If the allegations in Mayweather’s own lawsuits carry any truth, then a fella who generated more than a billion dollars may not have maintained a firm grip on where a massive portion of it wound up. Sit with that for a minute. You can become one of the highest earners in boxing history and still find yourself in a courtroom trying to locate money you say belongs to you. That is no knock on his intelligence. It is a warning about what can happen when you hand off your own understanding completely and trust the wrong people to guard the vault.

Money himself is 49 now and continues to train while trying to arrange more appearances in the ring. His proposed September 2026 rematch with Pacquiao was postponed indefinitely, with tentative discussions shifting the contest into 2027. A planned exhibition against Mike Tyson has faced delays as well. None of us standing outside his circle can say whether the motivation is legacy, money or some combination of the two. Either way, the image of a champion his age preparing to climb through the ropes again tells its own quiet story about how thin the line can become between earning a fortune and holding onto one.

Take this lesson without paying the tuition he may have paid for it. Earning is something our people have demonstrated across every generation you can name. What got kept from us, and what we too seldom went out and found for ourselves, was the knowledge of how to make a dollar stay put. Learn the game underneath the game. Then sit your children down and pass it along before the world teaches it to them the rough way.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

That choice matters to me, and I suspect it should matter to any brother past forty who feels welded to a role he got handed long ago.

We get typed early. Somebody decides who you are before you finish deciding for yourself. You become the provider, the steady one, the fellow nobody worries about because he handles his business and never complains. Then you wake up around fifty and notice the costume fused to your skin somewhere along the way. You are still playing a character written by other people, and the script offers no third act.

His Airness had every reason to stay frozen. The safest move for a legend is to keep selling the legend. Show up, wave, cash the check, let everybody keep calling you the greatest. Plenty of famous athletes pick that path. They spend their back nine performing a younger version of themselves for a crowd that only wants the highlight reel.

MJ went a different direction, and the racing chapter tells you plenty about why.

23XI Racing, the team he co-owns with Denny Hamlin, spent well over a year at war with NASCAR itself. Two organizations accused the sport of running a monopoly, and rather than fold, Michael sat in a Charlotte courtroom during the trial and testified about a boyhood spent visiting tracks in Charlotte, Rockingham, Darlington, and Talladega. Late in 2025, the sides settled, producing evergreen charters and revised terms for NASCAR’s chartered teams, although the financial details remained confidential. Then the 2026 season opened and Tyler Reddick captured the Daytona 500 in the No. 45 before following it with victories in Atlanta and at the Circuit of the Americas. He became the first driver in Cup Series history to win the opening three races of a season.

Sit with that. A billionaire in his sixties, comfortable beyond arithmetic, chose to wage a bruising legal battle for a garage full of folks who are not him. In his own words, the goal was the betterment of the sport, and he was willing to risk the future of 23XI if that was what change required. That is not somebody guarding a statue of himself. What you are watching is a grown adult who located a fresh thing worth caring about and threw his whole chest into it.

The water tells the same story in a softer key.

Jordan owns a Viking sportfishing vessel measuring 80 feet, wrapped in that elephant print and christened Catch 23. He and his crew enter blue marlin tournaments at places like Morehead City, once hauling in a fish weighing 442.3 pounds and grinning on the dock like rookies who just made the squad. Golf works on him the same way. He told an interviewer that he played almost every day, usually thirty six holes. People close to him have described the course as a mental escape, a place where the noise surrounding Michael Jordan can finally quiet down.

What gets me is that none of these pursuits carry the weight his basketball did. Nobody measures him against Bird or Magic on a fishing boat. No documentary crew judges his backswing against 1996. He picked arenas where the only judge is himself, and I think that is the whole secret. His younger self could finally rest.

That is the freedom I want older brothers to see clearly, because it has almost nothing to do with the money.

Yes, the fortune is absurd. Forbes put his 2026 figure at 4.3 billion dollars, placing him among the wealthiest former athletes in the world. Decades of endorsement income, led by his relationship with Nike, built a large part of it. Another major payday came when he sold his majority interest in the Charlotte Hornets in 2023. The franchise was valued at 3 billion dollars, nearly eleven times the 275 million dollars he paid in 2010, and he retained a minority stake. Those dollars are real. But cash is not the lesson. A working brother reading this cannot buy a sportfishing yacht, and does not need to. What he can borrow is the posture underneath it, the willingness to say the person I used to be served his purpose, and now I get to meet somebody else.

The giving makes that plainest of all.

Late in 2025, Michael handed 10 million dollars to Novant Health in Wilmington, the town where he came up. Novant said the gift brought the total its foundation had received from him to 27 million dollars. He aimed the new money at neuroscience care for stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other complex conditions, and asked that the institute carry his mother’s name, Deloris. A dedication ceremony arrived early in 2026. Consider the arc there. As a sophomore at Laney High School, he failed to make varsity and played junior varsity instead, a disappointment he turned into fuel. MJ became maybe the most competitive human on the planet. That same man now spends real energy helping families across southeastern North Carolina reach advanced neurological care. The institute carries his mother’s name, not his own. His scoreboard changed for good.

None of this erases the flaws. The gambling tales are real, the coldness he showed teammates is documented, the ego was a monster. Becoming somebody new does not require pretending the earlier version was a saint. It only requires believing the next chapter can be written at all.

That belief is the quiet gift he is handing the rest of us.

What wears down brothers our age is the sense that the die got cast years back. You are the funny one, the hard one, the churchgoing one, the fellow who buried his own dreams so the kids could chase theirs. Fine. Those parts held you up when you needed holding. But a part is not a cage, and fifty is nowhere close to a verdict. Pick up fishing at fifty three if the water calls you. Go back to school. Plant a garden, learn the bass, fall in love all over again. Build a thing with your hands that has nothing to do with the man your people always swore you were.

His Airness did not find that permission in a trophy case. He found it in the ordinary human act of getting curious again about being alive.

We can find it in the same place. The former self earned his rest, so let him have it. And the person still breathing gets to go see what else the deep water holds.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Which is exactly why what Dwyane Wade has done with his daughter Zaya deserves a longer look than most folks give it.

Back in 2020, when Zaya was twelve, she came out to her family as transgender. The retired guard has told this story more than once, and the piece that stays with me is not the announcement. It is what he walked in on. His girl was hiding. Tucked into Gabrielle Union’s arm on a chair, too scared to speak to her own daddy. He has admitted since that he went and stood at a mirror to sit with one brutal question. Why was his baby afraid of him?

Sit with that honestly for a second. Most men would have gone straight to defense, blaming the internet or the school or somebody down the street. He turned the light on himself instead. What was it about his own idea of being a man, he started asking, that made his kid flinch? Then came the harder admission, the locker room talk and careless phrases he had tossed around for years. Where I come from, that brand of honesty takes more spine than a hundred loud speeches about being hard. Plenty of Black men never find their way to it.

Here is the part I want every brother reading this to really chew on. Dwyane has never pretended he entered this journey with every answer. He has admitted that his earliest public conversations were uncomfortable because he did not yet know much of the language or have all the information. And at no point did he use that uncertainty as a reason to pull away. He kept choosing love and acceptance while he learned.

That right there is the whole ballgame.

Somewhere along the line we talked ourselves into believing a good daddy has to comprehend his kid completely before he earns the right to stand behind them. That is a lie. Nobody figures their children out all the way. My own pops got maybe half of what I loved, and he loved me through the rest regardless. Comic books baffled him. My music he flat called noise. He kept showing up anyway, and the showing up was the whole message.

This man landed on the same truth, except he did it on a national stage with a crowd waiting to drag him. When his family posted a Thanksgiving picture with Zaya in it, the comments turned vicious fast. Grown people came for a child over nail polish and a crop top. He did not tuck her out of sight. Instead he defended his family publicly, and months later, while speaking about Zaya’s coming out, called her a leader.

Understand what I am not doing here. I am not telling anybody how to feel about being transgender. Grown folks can wrestle with their own convictions, their faith, whatever they have worked out about all of it. That conversation belongs between them and God. My point is narrower, and I believe it is a lot tougher to argue with. A parent’s love was never meant to arrive with conditions stapled to it. Nor was it meant to require you to sign off on every decision before you keep the door open.

Look at what this father actually did once he quit waiting to have it all figured out. He shifted into protection. Every single time his girl steps out the front door, he has said, the fear sits there with him, and not only over the usual dangers that keep any parent up at night. What eats at him is how the world looks at her. He later explained that Florida’s political climate was one reason his family no longer lived there, saying they would not feel accepted or comfortable. In California, they sought a setting where Zaya could breathe easier. Then he and Zaya launched Translatable, an online community for LGBTQ young people and a resource hub for the parents and families scrambling to hold them up. He took his own dread and shaped it into cover for other people’s babies too.

There was a dream he also had to let die, and I respect the way he owned it. A ballplayer is what he had wanted. Somebody to follow him into the league and carry the name. When Zaya’s road bent somewhere he had not pictured, he released that vision without a drop of bitterness. His line on it cut clean. Watch what happens, he warned, when you start making plans for other folks’ lives. That journey was never his to script.

Now look at where things stand. Last year that same young woman walked across her graduation stage with the Head of School’s Award in hand, her daddy beaming beside her and celebrating the moment online the way any proud parent would. Zaya headed off to college that fall. She has called him her biggest advocate and said he inspires her more than anyone else. A bond that opened with a terrified kid folded into a chair has grown into one of the steadiest connections you will find between a parent and his child. And none of it grew from him suddenly comprehending it all. It happened because he would not let his confusion cancel his commitment.

For Black fathers raising babies here in 2026, with the culture this loud and this split down the middle, the lesson costs nothing and shifts everything. Your son might pick a life you cannot even picture. Maybe your girl hands you something you own no map for. You are not obligated to solve it. Nobody is asking you to have the speech ready or the theology sorted or your feelings lined up in a row. You are asked to stay in the room, to listen when a lecture would come easier, and to keep learning long after walking away starts to look like the simpler move.

Dwyane has not claimed to be flawless, and he is not faking it now. He got scared. Fumbled plenty. Said wrong things before he found the right ones. What he kept doing was choosing his child over his own comfort, again and again, out in the open, where it cost him plenty. That is a blueprint worth studying. Not because he had every answer, but because he loved his girl the whole time he was still hunting for them.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com

I understand where the feeling comes from. Truly. We watched him tumble down the board in 2025 while weaker prospects heard their names first, and plenty of us felt that fall in our own chests. Some of it looked foul. Yet there is daylight between having a brother’s back and wrapping him in so much padding that he can never move.

He is 24 now, smack in the middle of a 2026 battle for the starting job against Deshaun Watson. Second year in Cleveland, with Todd Monken running the show since he took the reins in January. The veteran got first crack at it. Cleveland’s second-year pro has been clawing to close the gap. None of that is persecution. That is a regular Tuesday in the National Football League.

Remember how his rookie run actually looked. He started the final stretch, went 3 and 4, tossed 7 scores against 10 interceptions, and his QBR settled somewhere around 18.9. Nobody calls those numbers a triumph. Branding them a scandal misses just as badly. They are a baseline. Green passers throw the ball to the wrong jersey. Peyton Manning threw a rookie-record 28 picks in 1998 and still carved out a gold-jacket career. Bradshaw? They booed him out of Pittsburgh early, benched the man more than once, and the rings came much later. Happens to the great ones all the time. They stink early, take their lumps in public, then figure it out. This league does not care what name is stitched across your shoulders.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A good chunk of the loudest voices online are not protecting the kid at all. They are protecting a storyline. If he sits, it has to be racism. Praise the veteran’s footwork and that becomes sabotage. Mention those 10 giveaways and a beat writer becomes a hater. So a competitor who by every account itches to compete gets frozen into a permanent victim by the same people swearing they love him.

That framing helps him not one bit. None. When you tell a professional that nothing is ever his fault, you are quietly informing him that he holds no power to fix a single thing. Sit with that. You strip a man of his agency and slap a bow on it and call it support.

I have coached a little, watched a lot, and lived long enough to recognize the pattern with our sons. There is a deep instinct among us to shield the young men in our lives, because the world has been swinging at them since forever. That instinct is sacred. It kept a whole lot of us breathing. Every good thing carries a shadow, though, and the shadow here is simple: a boy who never tastes a real consequence never grows into the thing he is chasing.

Losing teaches. Harshly. It mails its lessons collect. Shedeur needs to sail one over a receiver’s head on third and 6, feel that long walk back to the bench, sit in a dim film room on Monday while the tape freezes on a blown coverage read, then go repair it. That grind is how signal-callers get built. There is no elevator past it. Josh Allen handed the ball to defenses again and again before that light clicked on.

Deshaun deserves a fair mention too. The 30-year-old had barely seen live action since 2024 before this preseason, grinding back after rupturing his Achilles and then suffering another rupture of the same tendon that required a second surgery, riding a contract that finally runs dry after this season. Do not paint him as an untouchable monarch guarding the gate. Back nine of a career, the man is just trying to prove the arm still works. Should the younger option play better, that option starts. If not, the incumbent keeps studying tape and waiting a turn. Both truths can sit at the same table.

Preseason has painted a muddy picture so far. Against the Bears, neither guy grabbed the room by the collar, Cleveland ate a 34 to 10 loss, and the moment nobody wanted was a pass that nestled into the wrong colors. Then came Buffalo today, August 22nd, when the staff handed number 2 the whole first half, even though Cleveland rested most of its veteran starters and put him behind a second-string offensive line with mostly backups around him. Shedeur completed his first eight throws and finished 9 of 11 for 74 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Watson followed and went 5 of 12 for 35 yards with an interception as Cleveland lost 31 to 7. Shedeur was the better quarterback on this particular afternoon. None of that means the job belongs to him now. It means he got a fair look and did something with it.

Will he seize the job by September 13 down in Jacksonville? Maybe. Maybe not. Monken still has not named his starter, and Saturday gave him something more to chew on rather than settling the matter cleanly. Shedeur helped himself against Buffalo. Watson did not slam the door. Cleveland still has a preseason finale against New England on August 27, although the staff may make its decision before then. Fine. A clipboard is not a coffin either way. Aaron Rodgers waited 3 seasons in Green Bay. Steve Young studied behind Joe Montana and squeezed every drop from it. Waiting only wrecks a passer who chooses to pout while he waits.

What actually worries me is not the depth chart. It is the noise around it. A whole ecosystem now feeds off manufactured outrage on his behalf, because a wronged prospect prints clicks better than a developing one ever could. Each week they will dig up fresh insult. Maybe a snap count. Then some stray quote. Or a survey that placed him 35th out of 35 veteran quarterbacks entering the season, which, sure, stings, though who on earth cares in August.

The funny twist is that the young man himself seems to grasp all this. Ask about the derby and you get a shrug, plus a line about the only rival worth naming being the face in the mirror. No panic. Zero alibis. Healthier than half the folks defending him from their phones. So there stands a competitor, going hard, while the comment section litigates.

So my plea, from somebody who has watched this business chew up hyped prospects and lift overlooked ones in equal measure: turn him loose. Give him room to fail on a Sunday and answer for it at the podium afterward. A staff should hold him to a standard without anybody screaming for a firing. All of it, the sweet and the sour, is tuition owed.

Deion’s boy is not spun from glass. Locker rooms raised him. Boulder saw that program hauled across his shoulders, 4,134 yards and 37 touchdowns in a final college fall, so the glare of bright lights is old news. Our lane is not to fight his battles. His alone is to fight them.

Stumble, rise, repeat. That is the assignment handed to every kid who ever strapped on a helmet. This franchise gave him an honest shot this August. Against Buffalo, he took one more step toward making the decision difficult. Let the process breathe, and let the rest of us unclench and quit treating a plain old competition like some crime against the culture.

He will be alright. Just clear the room and let him work.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

There are not many events in history that transcend the sport landscape and make a significant cultural impact. Muhammad Ali’s name change from Cassius Clay for religious reasons, Jackie Robinson’s integration into Major League Baseball, and Jack Johnson’s World Heavyweight Championship victory are a few of the more notable events that transcended sports and made an impact on the American historical landscape. Those events also incorporated the issue of a race at a time when it was an extremely volatile issue. However, one of the events in sports history that intertwines the issues of race and sport with the most controversy is the Black Power salute by Olympic medal winning sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics.

Before making history in political sense, Tommie Smith and John Carlos represented the United States in 200-meter track event during the 1968 Olympics. “The gold medal that Smith won in the 200-meters on October 16, 1968, was a spectacular athletic achievement. What followed after the race would stand as one of the most powerful images in sports and Olympic history.  As “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and simultaneously raised a black-gloved fist, and the stadium crowd slowly but steadily booed and jeered in reaction. Smith remained perfectly still, while Carlos raised his head slightly. In terms of an explanation for their actions, in an interview with broadcaster Howard Cosell Tommie Smith clarified, “The right glove that I wore on my right hand signified the power within black America. The left glove my teammate John Carlos wore on his left hand made an arc with my right hand and his left hand also to signify black unity. The scarf that was worn around my neck signified blackness. John Carlos and me wore socks, black socks, without shoes, to also signify our poverty,”.

The 1968 Olympics occurred during a time when race was at the forefront of American society. The Civil Rights Movement was working towards ending racial discrimination and increasing civil rights for African Americans. This made racial tension within the United States a serious problem that extended into sports. Although the boycotts by Black athletes at the 1968 Olympics were a possibility in the eyes of the American media, they never were put into effect as although black athletes did participate in the 1968 Summer Olympics, two young black men would instead make a political statement that would last a lifetime.

Before Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in the National Basketball Association during the 1990s, before Colin Kaepernick of the National Football League during the 2010s, there was John Carlos and Tommie Smith. The Black Power Salute at the 1968 Olympics is unarguably one of the most powerful images in sport of the last 50 years. However, it is its legacy outside of sport that will have a greater impact.

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

Understand me before you get heated. This is not about his heart. I have no window into what he prays about or what he tells his children at night. What I am watching is a role, the slot television keeps warm for a certain kind of brother. Credible enough to carry the conversation. Never dangerous to the people signing the checks.

Look at his lane since Clark turned pro. Caitlin Clark catches a shove, and he is quick to get online, stat lines ready, righteous. The league mishandled her. The players underrated her. The haters need to stop. He has played that part since her rookie year, quick to the keyboard whenever anybody questions her shine and ready to defend the young star against whatever criticism is circulating. A few of those takes landed as fair. Then turn the camera the other direction. When it came to Angel Reese, the whole temperature changed. He went out of his way to declare she hated Clark, dressed it up as basketball evidence, and kept returning to the claim even after it drew heavy criticism.

Then came the truly ugly episode. A racist edit floated around showing Reese as a monkey on a video game cover. Griffin reposted it, typed the correct words about hatred having no place anywhere, and could not stop there. In the same breath, he circled back to the feud, claimed folks in her “inner circle” phoned him to confirm she resents her rival. Reese’s mother came out swinging, said nobody close to her daughter ever made such a call. The player herself called it what it looked like. Clout.

Watch who lined up against him. Shaq, threatening to punch him in the face over it, telling him to leave the young woman be. Mark Henry, the wrestling legend, admitted the mess made him look at Griffin differently. Even his former ESPN colleague Ryan Clark pointed out the strange fixation. A grown quarterback with a platform, again and again, aiming his fire at a then 23 year old sister while buffing the halo of the woman across from her.

That direction is the whole point.

The word I keep reaching for is “safe.” Not safe as an insult about his soul. Safe as a plain description of a job. Sports television loves a brother who will scold other Black folks on cue, because it lets a mostly mainstream room nod along without ever feeling accused of anything. He hands the segment its stamp of authenticity. He also hands everybody permission to stay cozy. You cannot call the take bigoted, look, a Black man said it. That is the trick, and it is old as dirt.

Here is where memory gets interesting. Back in 2012 an analyst named Rob Parker went on morning television and questioned whether Griffin was really “one of us,” floating his white fiancée and his rumored politics as proof. Cornball brother, Parker sneered. It was reductive and mean. ESPN suspended him and later declined to renew his contract, citing those RG3 remarks among its reasons. I am not resurrecting that garbage to co sign it. I raise it because the same industry that once tried to read this quarterback out of the family later found a use for that exact posture, only pointed outward instead of at him. What got Parker pushed out became, years on, a marketable stance.

None of this bought him protection. ESPN let him go in 2024. Two years still on the deal, cut loose anyway. Then came the Jackie Robinson business. Griffin argued that Robinson breaking baseball’s color line was not itself a political act, and Stephen A. Smith was not having it. Carved him up publicly. Called the routine passive aggressive. Reminded everybody that this exact tap dance was why folks at the network had soured on him ages ago. So the reward runs thin. You keep the crowd cozy, and the shop can still show you the door when the numbers or the relationships change.

I keep circling back to the women in all this, because that is the tell. Critiquing a player is ordinary. Every analyst does it. But notice how often his sharpest energy lands on Reese, on the league, on sisters who dared to be loud in their own lane, while his softest instincts get saved for the phenom the mainstream already adores. He frames the whole thing as colorblind. Right and wrong has no color, he likes to say. Sounds noble. Works out differently. In practice the scolding pours toward a single bench, and the cover flows steadily to whoever the mainstream already loves.

Somebody reading this will decide I am too hard on him, that a man is entitled to his opinions, that both athletes are grown professionals who can absorb a little heat. All true. I am not asking him to like anybody. Rivalries are real. Ballers talk trash, hold grudges, want to bury the opponent on the scoreboard. That is sports, and pretending it ought to be all hugs is silly. My problem sits somewhere else. When a highly visible Black sports commentator keeps volunteering to referee young Black women for the benefit of viewers who were never going to root for those women anyway, something is being sold, and it is not merely a basketball opinion.

And that seat costs something real. The old heads could tell you. Build your whole name on being the reasonable one, the guy who checks his own people so the set stays calm, and you learn a hard truth soon enough. They are renting you. Nobody at the network is adopting you. No chair with your name carved into it. Just a chair you borrow while you stay useful. Griffin is living that lesson right now, a layoff here, a Stephen A. monologue back yonder, the welcome always on a lease.

Nobody needs him to be a militant. I would happily settle for plain consistency. Defend the young star, by all means, but pump the brakes when your outrage on behalf of a favored competitor somehow always shows up carrying a lecture aimed at the sister across the way. People clock what you protect. And plenty of us clock exactly what you are willing to spend to stay welcome in that room.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Kick, mostly. That world came to him through Deen The Great, and before long the partnership turned the chaos surrounding them into a brand. They called themselves the Krash Out Boyz. Sit with that name a second. They put the meltdown right there in the title, sold it as content, and folks lined up to watch.

Here is what troubles me. Every slurred word, every argument, every time the former champ looked lost on camera, somebody clipped it. Chopped it into fifteen seconds, slapped a caption on top, pushed it into the feed. Millions watched. Folks laughed, shared, then waited for the next one like it was a sitcom with a fresh episode every night.

We have a phrase for all this now. Crashing out. The slang grew out of Black communities, with Louisiana playing an important part in its rise, and rappers helped carry it into the wider culture before social media wrung every last drop out of it. Now everybody says it, and far too often they say it about us.

That is the part few people want to touch. The internet has developed a real appetite for watching Black men fall apart in public. Not just Adrien. Think about how many viral moments feature a brother at his lowest, and how quickly the comments fill with laughing faces and popcorn. The unraveling becomes its own genre. Pain turns into product.

I am not naive about his role here. This is no child. Nobody forced him to sit in front of that camera. The drinking, the loud mouth, the public messes, all of it went out on film, and some of it became profitable. There have been financial troubles, a civil lawsuit containing serious allegations, and feuds spilling from livestreams into real life. In early July, he and Deen even had to be separated during a heated confrontation while wearing matching pink hoodies. You cannot excuse everything a person does just because he is struggling.

But the struggle is not speculation. Broner has publicly discussed problems with alcohol, gambling and his mental health. Back in 2016, friends became so concerned by alarming posts on his social media accounts that police were contacted. Years later, in 2022, he withdrew from a scheduled fight with Omar Figueroa Jr. and openly said he needed to take care of his mental health. That is not internet gossip. That is a man telling the world that something inside him needed attention.

So what does the audience do with that? Mostly nothing. Knowing he has struggled does not slow the clip machine down even a little. If anything, it can make the footage more valuable. Famous and coming undone reads as comedy to some people. Famous, broke and coming undone is an even bigger jackpot. Millions earned across a boxing career eventually gave way to very public financial trouble, and too many people treated the empty pockets like a punchline instead of a warning.

Deen deserves a word too. Give the brother his credit for helping pull Broner into a lane that generated income at a time when the big boxing checks were no longer arriving the way they once did. For a while, streaming looked like one of the smartest moves Adrien had made in years. Somebody handed him another way to stay visible, make money and build something outside the ring.

Trouble is, the same setup that gave Broner another income stream also kept cameras rolling through some of his lowest moments, and those moments repeatedly became the clips that traveled farthest. When the relationship between the two men became strained, Deen arranged for another cameraman so Broner could run his own broadcasts. The partnership split publicly. More clips followed. Even the breakup became part of the show.

I keep circling one thing. Underneath the meme is a person. A human being with a mama, with children, with a body that has absorbed thousands of punches and a mind he has openly admitted has struggled. We know this. The receipts have been sitting in front of us for years. We watch anyway, because watching is easy and caring costs something.

Ryan Garcia, of all people, publicly reached out earlier this year and encouraged Broner to stop drinking and get himself together. Fans typed the same thing underneath video after video. Please stop drinking. Get some help. Some meant it. Plenty of those same people turned around and reposted the newest breakdown because the engagement was too good to leave alone. That contradiction lives in everybody who consumes this kind of content. We say we care while our thumbs hit share.

I came up in a time when a brother falling apart got handled quietly. Family stepped in. The church folks came by. Somebody sat with you. It was not entertainment, and it sure was not a revenue stream. I am not romanticizing those days, because plenty of hurt got buried that should have been spoken about openly. But we have swung so far in the other direction that a person’s collapse can now play out before an audience of strangers who treat every ugly moment like another episode.

And here is where the story gets more interesting. Broner is trying to change the ending. This summer he and Deen launched a 45 day streaming challenge built around sobriety, training, losing weight and preparing for another possible boxing run. Broner has been talking about staying sober, getting his body back and returning to the ring. People inside boxing, including Claressa Shields, have encouraged the effort. Maybe the real test for the audience is what happens now. We were willing to watch every stumble. Are we willing to pay the same attention when the man is trying to stand back up?

Maybe the honest question is no longer simply what is wrong with Adrien. We know a good deal about what has troubled him because he has told us himself. The harder question aims at the rest of us, the ones scrolling, laughing and waiting for tomorrow’s clip. What does it say about us if a Black man’s breakdown earns more attention than his attempt to rebuild?

There is no clean answer here. Broner still has responsibility for what he says, what he does and what he puts in front of a camera. Grace does not mean pretending bad decisions never happened. But accountability and compassion are not enemies. A man can answer for his choices without becoming public property at his lowest moment.

The better story now is not whether Adrien Broner can give the internet another crash out clip. It is whether he can stay sober, keep training, regain some discipline and build something healthier than the spectacle that surrounded him. Maybe he fights again. Maybe boxing never looks the way it once did. Either way, the man was never a punchline.

Give him some grace. Or at least give his recovery as much attention as you gave his collapse. That much ought to be fair.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

Athletes going public with personal health problems should always be viewed positively. Professional athletes are some of the best examples of the incredible things that the human body can do as they perform on the playing field or playing court. For pro athletes to reveal that they are dealing with significant health issues is a moment of vulnerability that should be applauded especially for male athletes. In sports, athletes are not expected to show vulnerability or weakness so coming forward about health issues is the opposite of what they have known to do as they have played their sport for decades as a kid, teenager, and then adult as a professional.

During the 2010s, one of the most exciting running backs in the National Football League was Chris Johnson. The former first round pick entered the NFL from a smaller conference school, East Carolina, and Johnson himself did not have the size of fellow first round running backs such as Darren McFadden, Jonathan Stewart or Rashard Mendenhall. However, Johnson’s rare speed set him apart from virtually every running back of his era. A scatback in the mold of former Eagles halfback Brian Westbrook, Chris Johnson was a homerun hitter who began his NFL career with six consecutive 1,000-yard rushing seasons. However, his second NFL season led to his nickname “CJ2K” being born when he ran for 2006 rushing yards in 2009 and displayed that his frame could hold up to be a featured back in a major way.

Finish story here; Chris Johnson’s public bravery deserves public recognition.