Nick Wright and the Shameless Clown Industry

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looking like a nine-year-old dressing up in his dad’s work clothes as a gag

Sports media is, famously, one of the deepest pits of hell, a cesspool of aimless shouting, pointless provocation, and artificial culture war. I always thought that 30 Rock’s “Sports Shouting” bit captured that whole world perfectly. And I can think of no figure in sports media who better emblemizes how sports media corrupts everything it touches than FS1’s Nick Wright, a particularly shameless clown in an industry of shameless clowns. And to show my cards, I’ll tell you upfront that the tragic part is that I frequently see a thoughtful adult hidden within the Nick Wright clown world persona, one that has been systematically beaten out of Nick Wright the person by the dictates of his profession. I mean, you can’t blame Skip Bayless for being Skip Bayless, a man who appears to occupy the mental state of a permanently-concussed 7th-grader. He’s all moron inside and out. Wright strikes me as a guy I would like very much if he wasn’t so consumed with the dirty business of being a sports shouter. And nowhere is that more evident than in his all-consuming, deeply personal hatred of Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen.

Wright had a very good night last night, as his Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Buffalo Bills, 27-24. (I say “his” because Wright is an inveterate Kansas City homer, who has the unfortunate quality of both making his rooting interests completely plain and yet never accepting that those interests completely distort his analysis.) The Bills have defeated the Chiefs in Kansas City in three straight regular season games, but have now lost three playoff games to them in a row, the last being an instant-classic 2021 game in Arrowhead that featured stunningly impeccable quarterback play from both players and which ended after the Bills defense coughed up a three-point lead with 13 seconds left to play. Allen never touched the ball in overtime. You’d think that would absolve him from criticism, right? Nope! Wright always finds a way to hang that loss on him anyway. No matter the topic of the day, he will always, always find a way to turn the conversation back to the Bills and how Josh Allen is supposedly not worthy of a roster spot in the NFL and blah blah blah, relentlessly, to the point of exhaustion.

(The two teams the Chiefs have beaten this postseason, the Bills and the Miami Dolphins, have been absolutely ravaged by defensive injuries; by my count, of the 22 defensive starters the Chiefs might have faced in those two games, 13 were injured, which certainly undermines all the talk of a Chiefs offensive rebirth. But this is not a narrative the NFL media cares to explore, so.)

Allen was excellent last night, hurt by several huge drops from his receivers and let down by a defense that was hopelessly hamstrung by missing stars. He moved the ball over and over again with his legs, tossed an absolutely insane touchdown pass to Khalil Shakir, and avoided the turnovers that (the media narrative goes) have always hurt his teams. (My friends, interceptions are objectively not as bad as people in football media think.) Despite months of talk of a lost season, Allen dragged his team to six consecutive wins, and now has rung up five consecutive years with 10 wins, five consecutive years with a playoff birth, five consecutive years with a playoff win, and four consecutive AFC East titles, after the Bills wandered in the desert for decades during the Tom Brady years. He followed that all up with a divisional round playoff game in which he did all that he could do. Has Wright found a way to slander Allen about it anyway? Of course he has! Of course he has. Because he’s completely obsessed. When Allen was selected to be on the cover of the Madden football game - an honor any player would take and one which comes with millions of dollars - Wright took the opportunity to relentlessly mock Bills fans for… being excited for their quarterback. That’s it. That was their crime. I think this is the ugliest dimension of this whole ugly business, that Wright thinks his role should be to mock and deride Buffalo Bills fans for being fans, for rooting for their team and its players.

Look at Wright’s tweets from last night and you’ll notice two things. The first is that he’s much more negatively obsessed with the Bills and Allen than he is positively obsessed with the Chiefs and Mahomes. The second is that he’s simply a cruel, rude, shitty person. The Bills fanbase has endured a lifetime of gut-shot losses and hard times. They just had another one. And as a 40-year-old man, you take that opportunity to dance on their grave like a fucking teenager? What is wrong with you? Your team has done nothing but win! Why can’t you be gracious? If you need a lesson in that, here, here’s your team’s star tight end Travis Kelce, giving Allen credit, being gracious and kind. Because that’s what adults do. Be an adult. Grow up. You’re 40. Grow up. Just grow up!

I’m not the only one who has noticed; Google around and you’ll find a lot of people reacting to Wright’s positively creepy level of obsession. Here’s a recent video titled “Why is Nick Wright so SALTY about Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills?” I think the answer to that is twofold. The first part is simply that the Bills have emerged as one of the few consistent challengers to the current run of dominance of the Chiefs, and Wright is the kind of homer who thinks that sports would be better if no other team ever emerged to challenge his. (Wright also constantly insists that Cincinnati Bengals QB Joe Burrow is the real challenger, based on the claim that Burrow has been better in the playoffs; go look at the playoff numbers for Allen and Burrow, please, go look, because Wright certainly isn’t going to.) This is stupid and pointless. The second reason is uglier: Wright is one of many, many people in the media who were relentlessly critical of Allen as a draft prospect, he has made all of them look foolish by becoming unquestionably one of the three or four most valuable players in football, and they’re mad about it. For whatever reason, the draftniks not only hated Allen as a prospect, their antipathy towards him again seemed both excessive and personal. He was treated as an archetype of everything wrong with NFL draft evaluation. How intense did this get? Observe!

The entirety of math itself.

That is, I would suggest, not a normal kind of a thing to write about the draft process, which is famously chancy and hard to assess. I messaged the guy who wrote that piece this past weekend, and he just sniffed about how Allen was that one-in-a-million outcome. But of course the whole point is that you shouldn’t ever express this much confidence about anything that happens in the draft, given the track record of draft projections. SBNation ran tons of these anti-Allen hit pieces, all of them seemingly motivated by anger that a prospect who didn’t look like the prototypical quality NFL starter would potentially be picked early. Pro Football Focus was relentlessly critical of the idea that Allen should be drafted in the first round, with writers like Steve Palazzolo and Sam Monson rejecting the notion that Allen could become a quality starter with confidence that simply shouldn’t be found in NFL draft analysis. Former NFL offensive lineman turned analyst Geoff Schwartz was equally dismissive. So were many others. (These people mostly just pretend that they never doubted him, now.) And Wright too was one of many who predicted that Allen would be out of the league in a few years. Then Allen transformed into a uniquely dangerous running-and-passing weapon, Wright looked dumb, he resents it, and that combined with his rampant homerism and, especially, the incentives of sports media careers led to this bizarre Guenter Parche situation with Allen.

You may be surprised to hear that I’m actually a lifelong Bears fan, myself, not a Bills fan. So why does Wright’s obsessive mockery of Allen bother me so much? First, because of the criticism and dismissal he faced in the draft process that I mentioned above. It’s the same reason I always root for Trae Young in the NBA - because like Allen he went through months of people doubting him and saying he was no good, vociferously, in a way that clearly crossed over into the personal. Allen famously wasn’t recruited out of high school at all, had to go to junior college, then emailed 1,000 schools to see if he could play for them, finally getting an offer only from lowly Wyoming. Then he became one of the biggest piñatas in draft forecasting history, and proceeded to shove all that rejection up the ass of the sports establishment. I don’t know how you root against for that guy, I really don’t. And I don’t know how you don’t root for the poor Bills fans.

That’s the other thing: as a lifelong Chiefs fan, Wright knows essentially nothing about sports misery. The Chiefs weren’t winning Super Bowls until Patrick Mahomes came along, but the Chiefs have been a good, winning team for almost Wright’s entire life. Since he was born in 1984, the Chiefs have averaged 9 wins a season; in the past ten years, they’ve averaged more than 11.5 wins. They’ve won two Super Bowls in four years. Yes, the Mahomes teams are championship teams, but the Alex Smith teams were mostly very good, the Priest Holmes/Larry Johnson teams had their moments, they made the playoffs every year for the first half of the 1990s…. This is a level of sports privilege that is truly rare. And if you have had such success, and a notoriously snake-bitten franchise like the Bills and their deeply passionate fans take another kick to the teeth, you can just be a fucking better person and express a little sympathy. The responsibility that comes with rooting for a consistent winner, if you’re a good person, is to be gracious in victory. The only consistent winning team I’ve had the privilege of following as a sports fan was the Bulls teams of the late 1990s that won Michael Jordan’s last three championships. I was an adolescent, and the internet wasn’t really a thing, and yet I knew enough to know that when you enjoy that sort of success as a fan, it’s your job to be kind to other fans. Wright is the opposite of kind.

This is how you know Wright truly is a Kansas City Chiefs fan, his constant sense of grievance and feeling disrespected. It’s a fanbase that combines preening self-satisfaction and arrogance with a massive persecution complex. You know, the kind of persecution complex that comes from winning all the time and watching your players win awards and having Taylor Swift throw parties in your luxury box where half the attendees don't know there’s a football game going on. Chiefs fans combine the entitlement of Patriots fans with the sad-sack self-pity of Browns fans. It's incredible; all they do is win and watch their quarterback receive a career-long blowjob from the media, then call whatever wretched sports radio stations they have down there and complain about how “disrespected” they are. Why can you people not just fucking enjoy this?? Exactly how much team success, how many awards, how much consideration of whether Mahomes is already the greatest ever, and how much ball-fondling of Travis Kelce by the entire media is it going to take for Kansas City fans to drop this whole routine? “Oh boohoo wah wah wah no one respects us, that’s why Patrick Mahomes is the best player in football by wide affirmation and we get picked as Super Bowl favorites every year, pass me that deep-fried turkey leg so I can die of a massive coronary at 47?” What amount of respect would you require, exactly, if the past five years have not provided enough? Get fucked.

My fanbase still calls Jim McMahon a legend, and his career quarterback rating was 78. DURING HIS CAREER BEST YEAR, HIS SUPER BOWL YEAR, HE THREW 15 TOUCHDOWNS. That is the Mount Rushmore QB of the Bears in my lifetime. Justin Fields finally looks like the real thing, but the economics of football dictate that we get rid of him and draft Caleb Williams, who I promise you will blow out both knees in the next three seasons. Kyle Orton genuinely stands as one of the best quarterbacks I’ve ever rooted for in my life. Do you know what it’s like trying to get excited for Jay Cutler, who genuinely, deeply disliked playing professional football and demonstrated all the motivation of a kid being forced to go to Grandma’s? And Kansas City fucking Chiefs fans complain every day about “disrespect”! Are you goddamn kidding me? It's no wonder the entire fanbase is made up of Republicans; both groups epitomize the rage of the overdog, people whose first response to good fortune and privilege is to say “hey, why don't I have more?!?” In this, Wright is the perfect avatar, the smirking, self-impressed bully who can’t enjoy winning unless it comes with a side of cruelty.

It would go down a little easier if there was anyone in Wright’s orbit who actually stood up to him and called out his cruelty. Core to the business of yelling about sports, if you’re as ambitious as Wright, is setting yourself up against pliable enemies. This has in fact proven to be Bayless’s major problem in recent years, as his counterparts Stephen A. Smith and Shannon Sharpe both chafed against Bayless’s clear desire to play the role of wisdom-dispensing sage on his version of Sports Shouting. Wright has maneuvered delicately in this regard. Against him he has set Chris Broussard, a man misguided enough to use the word “retarded” as a pejorative on national television in 2023, and Kevin “I'm Just Happy to be Here” Wildes, who seems content in life to play the role of the Washington Generals and sigh off into the distance. Neither of these guys are stupid or unworthy of a platform, but they’re clearly set up primarily to let Nick Wright cook, by which I mean constantly slandering professional athletes for things they can’t control. Broussard is a certified Jesus freak, Wildes appears to be perpetually impatient for the show to end so that he can make his tee time, and both seem to know exactly what they were hired to do. Wright has gotten so fucking wild in his hatred of Allen, the Bills, and his other various targets in part because he has built the kind of career where he never encounters resistance. Who exactly is ever in a position to stand up to this guy?

It all reminds me, incidentally, of Bill Simmons’s decade-long negative obsession with LaDainian Tomlinson. Simmons is usually fairly charming and self-aware about being a homer, but sometimes he lets it cloud his judgment, and nowhere was that more distasteful than with LT. The Patriots were the dominant franchise for two decades, and one of the only AFC teams that seemed to challenge them were Tomlinson’s Chargers teams. And Simmons just hated, hated, hated the idea of a team that had the temerity to compete with his team. It led him to become an obsessive critic of Tomlinson, in his columns and his podcasts, to the point where it genuinely creeped me out. Even regular podcast guest Cousin Sal called him out on it once or twice. I think I recall Simmons once finding a way to bash Tomlinson while having a podcast discussion about golf. (Golf!) And of course the cudgel that he beat LT with was the fact that those Chargers never won a championship. It’s asinine to act like the failure to win a ring lies on the shoulders of a quarterback, given how many other players contribute. But blaming a running back, a running back, for not winning a championship? Absurd, insane, unreal. Then when LT retired Simmons wrote this condescending appreciation of him. It makes Wright’s fixation feel very familiar. I’d ask Simmons about it but I think he’s busy producing another 17 podcasts run by guys he went to school with in 8th grade.

For the record, this isn’t at all just a Josh Allen thing. You could watch this video of 49ers fans justly mocking Wright for shitting on Brock Purdy all game last Saturday only to turn around and start whining as soon as San Francisco won. But the real analog is Wright’s treatment of reigning NBA champion and NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic. As you can see in the video above, Wright spent years not just questioning Jokic’s play or expressing skepticism over his chances of winning a championship, but muttering darkly about Jokic’s character and suggesting that anyone who valued what he did on a basketball court was a fraud. The worst MVP in 30 years! He got personal in much the same way he does with Allen. And then last year, to my great delight, Jokic put his big Serbian balls directly on Wright’s face, winning the championship, collecting the Finals MVP, becoming the first NBA player in history to lead the playoffs in points, rebounds, and assists, and probably earning himself a spot among the ten best big men in NBA history. He has every chance to become a top-20 NBA player by the time his career is over. Has this humbled Wright, at all? No, obviously. He simply spent five minutes being vaguely embarrassed about it on his show, and now acts like he was never a Jokic doubter. Because, again, there’s no accountability in the industry.

An important thing to consider about Wright is that his hatred doesn’t just lead him to make comically personal and unprofessional criticisms of the athletes he hates, it also turns him into a complete moron. Consider this conversation with Bomani Jones, in which Wright, trying once again to muster a narrative that the most celebrated football player of his generation is somehow disrespected, claims that Josh Allen is the “four-time media MVP”:

Hey, Nick: it’s the media that votes for the actual MVP, you dork. Calling a player the “media MVP” is nonsensical; the media MVP is the fucking MVP! And Josh Allen’s never gotten one. What on earth could it mean to talk about a “media MVP” when the actual MVP is a media MVP? I have no idea. What I know for sure is that Wright’s been in this occupation for so long that it’s dropped his effective IQ by about 25 points. For the record Bomani Jones is nobody’s fool and could have pointed out that the concept of a media MVP is nonsensical, but one of the iron-clad rules of the shameless clown industry is that you always let a shameless clown cook. That’s how shameless clowns make their money.

Wright, by the way, is ostensibly some sort of political progressive, but he constantly pals around with Colin Cowherd, which is strange. Cowherd is a guy who was forced out at ESPN after going hard with a “people from the Dominican Republic are dumb” take and who was one of the most gleeful of the many sports pundits who did a little grave dancing over the death of Sean Taylor, under the theory that he was a thug or whatever. (Only thugs ever get killed by burglars in home invasions gone bad, or something.) Cowherd also happens to be one of the most relentlessly, aggressively wrong pundits in sports media, an industry that pumps out acres of dumb takes every minute of every day. How does Wright justify cozying up to Cowherd in this way? I'm guessing it has something to do with the size of Cowherd’s audience. That's showbiz, baby! There's this whole code of omerta going on where even the thoughtful members of the shameless clown industry refuse to call out the worst offenders. They can’t afford to; this is a business where there’s always more people fighting over fewer and fewer seats. Everyone in media is scared to be unpopular with other people in media for fear of the professional consequences, and sports media is even more driven by personal relationships and patronage than media writ large.

And this, finally, is the really important point: Nick Wright is a symptom, not the disease. I’m forever asking people to think structurally in politics and to focus less on individuals, and we can do the same here. I wasn’t blowing smoke at the beginning when I suggested that there’s a thoughtful guy hiding somewhere in Wright’s Michael-Douglas-in-Wall-Street suits and ridiculous oversized wristwatches. I genuinely think that there’s someone perceptive and even potentially humble in there. The trouble is that he has no incentive to be that guy and every incentive to continue acting like a petulant child. The term “crybully” always comes to mind when I watch him, the kind of person who simultaneously demonstrates his power over other people while he whines about being held down himself. But he also occasionally says something very probing and self-aware - most often on other people’s podcasts, when he’s not as committed to playing Mr. Contrarian Smartass Sports Man. But on his show, and on Twitter, and on his Instagram Live, he’s always fully in character, and that character is a complete asshole. Why has he lashed himself to the Bills fanbase in this awful negative feedback loop? Because he knows it drives engagement and that engagement makes careers. That’s why. And he’s been doing this long enough that you wonder whether the dull, nasty clod that he pretends to be has fully overtaken the thoughtful person that I suspect lies within.

Ultimately, Wright is just one guy, one particularly malignant narcissist in an industry full of narcissists, just one random formerly-bullied kid turned petty bully himself, a red-headed stepchild who's been empowered to spread his ugly idiocy by an industry that absolutely will not stop rewarding preening overconfidence and cruel pomposity. I watch Stephen A. Smith and there are so many flashes of a perceptive, sharp, and reasonable person in there, and then the next minute he has to pay the bills and so he dives right back into useless shouting. There are a ton of people in sports media who are smart, passionate, and hardworking, who have the kind of perspective Wright so thoroughly lacks. But there are very few stars who embody those qualities. The thoughtful ones don’t get their own cable news shows. People like Bayless, Cowherd, and Wright do, and the more wrong they are, the more they’re celebrated by cynical executives, and the more deeply they crawl into the ugly little characters they’ve created. That is what the market will bear. We get more of what we reward, which is another way to say that we get what we deserve, and I’m very sorry to say that what we deserve looks like Nick Wright, off to kick another young Bills fan in the face for having the audacity to dream of his team finally winning.