It turns out that defending women’s sports is a no-go if you want a long-term career at ESPN.

Samantha Ponder, host of “Sunday NFL Countdown,” has been fired, according to The Athletic. Ponder, who reportedly had a three-year, $3 million contract, was reportedly “let go for financial reasons as ESPN approaches the end of its fiscal year in late September.” TThe New York Times sports publication reported this.

Yes, exactly.

Just this January, ESPN released a glowing press release about the success of Sunday NFL Countdown. The show “achieved its most-watched regular season since 2019 and its second-best since 2016… . Viewership increased 8% compared to the 2022 season and 15% compared to the 2021 season,” the sports network boasted, noting that Sunday NFL Countdown had grown its audience among women and young adults.

Perhaps the increase in viewership for the 2023 season was due to Ponder expressing popular views.

Ponder caused a stir in May 2023 when she retweeted former college swimming champion Riley Gaines, who competed against Lia Thomas, a biological man, and has since been a vocal advocate for denying men access to women’s sports.

“It’s not hateful to demand fairness in sports for girls,” Ponder wrote on X. When a user accused her of being a “transphobe,” Ponder responded, “Call me whatever you want but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s inherently unfair for biological males to compete in women’s sports. That’s literally the reason they were segregated in the first place + the reason we needed Title IX(.)”

But that was not the end of the controversy.

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour warned: “Don’t be fooled by the people who shout ‘fairness’ to cover up their bigotry against transgender girls and women… This is – and always has been – about hate, fear and ignorance.”

Ponder probably also received criticism from ESPN bosses for her posts. Her former colleague Sage Steele told Gaines that her own social media posts about Thomas had earned her a reprimand. “I was told to stop tweeting about it. I was told to stop doing anything about it and to stop saying anything about it on social media because I was insulting others in the company,” Steele said in December, according to the New York Post.

In the meantime, it’s not as if ESPN has banned any conversations about transgender participation in women’s sports. In March 2023, the network honored Lia Thomas during a special broadcast for… Women’s History Month.

But it’s Ponder, Steele and Gaines – not ESPN or Nancy Armour – who express the opinion of most Americans. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans believe athletes should only be allowed to play “on teams that match their birth sex.” In January, a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 66% of Americans believed transgender girls should never or rarely be allowed to play on girls’ teams.

Recently, Ponder praised Italian boxer Angela Carini, who forhas cancelled her boxing match at the Olympic Games in Paris on August 1 against Algerian Imane Khelif, who probably has XY chromosomes and not XX chromosomes. “I am proud of this woman,” Ponder wrote about Carini. (Khelif, meanwhile, won the gold medal in women’s boxing in Paris.)

Earlier this year, Ponder also defended Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who had come under criticism from the left because he promoted traditional values ​​in a commencement speech at a Catholic college and said that women find fulfillment as wives and mothers.