Some brave commenter needs to point out that the Cavinder twins are athlete-hot and not hot-hot, so that we can talk about how this *should* diminish their post-basketball appeal, but apparently doesn’t.
Yeah I will be that idiotic person who is going to get attacked………
but I don’t find them particularly attractive. They are young and fit and put a lot of effort into their appearance. That is both worth a lot, and not really the same thing.
There is something about not being *only* an Instagram model that seems to have an effect here, but I can’t quite put into words what’s going on. I’m not sure if it’s maybe some kind of plausible deniability -- not in the sense that you are trying to hide from your wife why you like them, but in the sense that you feel maybe less of a mook to yourself if you follow them? If you’re ogling Olivia Dunne, she got into that outfit for gymnastics purposes, not just to be softcore porn, right? Right?
For a second there I was shook thinking Ethan might be the guy with the ponytail and glasses that walks in until I looked up his picture online.
And the idea that soft-core twins are being used to sell gambling addictions to young people on an app controlled by the CCP makes me want to launch every smartphone into the sun.
It’s almost 8 years later and “institutions’ still have not learned that if you offer the market a steady diet of socially awkward dorks spewing insincere, bland, and prepackaged sanctimony you’ll leave a lot of space for attractive and charismatic grifters to drink your milkshake.
Sure, they are somewhat malevolent but they are halfway self aware, funny enough and just being themselves anyway. Not appealing enough to take over an industry, but enough to crash it.
Also one other thing with this - I’d wager the lifespan of these characters is much like the music industry in the 90s, useful for a bit but soon discarded for a newer, slightly younger model, rinse and repeat.
Some may be relevant for a while but most will be chewed up and spat out and have no idea how and why they aren’t ‘it’ anymore.
Fantastic article, as was the Free Press piece. My only comment--it was obvious to me from the get-go that the college sports NIL industry would create a "hot girl" problem in women's sports. My question--how does this begin to impact team dynamics and recruiting? Eventually, more women's teams may have to deal with a problem that has seemed to mostly plague the men's game (and certain pro sports) where the "main thing" ceases to become the "main thing."
Your team could be bad at the sport, but if you drive a lot of interest in the school b/c you have a whole team of influencers, both sides may benefit indirectly (except for the coach).
It’s the same model mapped onto new technology - the big fish (Jake Paul) have their crew and minions who will eventually get their own popular channels or content farms. Is that any different from years past when popular ESPN anchors got more bites at the screen time apple? Paul’s interview show reminds me more of “The Man Show” or other early 2000s content where some of the side characters were bound to branch off and have success and the other would eventually disappear until they get summoned back to a reunion show. The fragmentation of media gives more money and opportunities to these younger personalities - but let’s not pretend like it’s going to provide longevity.
Imagine when ESPN can generate an AI pair of twin babes. They'll be hotter, nicer, smarter, and funnier than the Cavinders, and they'll never age or fuck their faces up with surgery. And for a price, you can get their pics, then hang out with them in the metaverse, then fuck them. Who needs Shirley Povich when you can virtually fuck gambling twins??
I didn't really get this piece. I'm not sold that the decline of The Athletic is linked to social media and influencers. Seems like two separate trends.
These twins are a pure throwback to what women have always made money at, being “really really good looking”. They are the perfect juxtaposition for Bud Light deciding to trash their companies previous decision to sell beer by putting hot women in their adds, to their own detriment.
Now unless you are playing something like women’s tennis or I suppose golf there’s just not a ton of add money for you even if your great, but that has gotten better in recent years, but then we have those women that are decent but they get a ton of ad revenue which other better players resent. I see this in Tennis (Kournikova and Sharapova come to mind) all the time, or in golf I see Paige Sp@$Kiac (I’m not looking it up) and I know she’s not great but she leans into everything and she has those attributes the superficial male seems to covet.
However the bigger story to me is why the Twins retired now because I just finished watching a ton of playoff basketball and I saw tons of unattractive WNBA players crammed down my throat why not a couple attractive NCAA women hoopers? I’d cautiously say it’s because of the optics and the NBA is as bad as Target and Bud Light at knowing their customers, as ESS has made a good living pointing out, he won’t touch this though.
The unspoken issue I wonder about is how a former WNBA player (Candace Wiggins) said about her own league, after she retired, that the lesbians resent the straight attractive women and it’s not comfortable to deal with it, the Lesbians are not tolerant women, and a cursory knowledge about the alphabet people seems to confirm this almost weekly.
I can imagine that these twins left because they realized it’s just not worth it to try to compete even at the NCAA level for the amount of harassment they probably got and would get even more if they really decided to keep playing. Or they just weren’t any good and their looks at that level had taken them as far as they could go, but can you imagine how angry the WNBA would be if they made a commercial with the Twins and not Candace Parker or Sue Bird?
Now ESS has already written about how a lot of sports leagues don’t seem to understand their base so why the hell does the NBA almost never have a commercial that doesn’t have some unattractive WNBA person in it? I only assume most are WNBA because the NBA is about as corporate genius as they come and they think that if they pound us with these unattractive women that we’ll just start buying their rubbish.
A few examples of just awful marketing that I mostly can’t tell what they were selling because I was mostly confused about what I was seeing:
- Steph Curry does a commercial with Candace Parker where she swats a phone out of his hand as if she’s Dikembe Mutombo, she’s 6 ft 4 so that means she’s probably an inch shorter, is it supposed to be funny or ironic?
- Or how about the one with Candace pimping muscle milk! Have you seen her arms, she’s got the definition of a glass of water, why not get Olive Oil while they’re at it. (It would have been better to talk about how at her age osteoporosis is a problem, as it is for a lot of older women and she needs to keep her bone density up).
- Or the woman that Mark Cuban is trying to make marketing pitches too, I have no idea who she is and won’t look it up, I’ll pass on the tube socks Mark.
-Or Sue Bird somehow using her collegiate and WNBA rings to trump Steph Curry, can anyone possibly imagine Christian Braun (ne Brown) going around and pimping his 3 high school, 1 collegiate, and now 1 NBA championship to someone like Steph, he’s got one more than you Steph.
- Maybe the second most annoying to the Muscle Milk add is the one where Jimmy Butler is getting a beer given to him by some WNBA woman talking about his air balls, he throws it back at her, and she throws it back at him, it’s just so damn stupid.
I could go on but something is really wrong with all these adds, almost as bad as the Nike add that ESS started his stack with and I could go on but fuck them.
A lot of interesting points you make there. I find myself stuck on one though, the concept that attractive or even just strait women might feel being in the WNBA would be a hostile place for them. I knew a girl years ago that played on the Oregon City high school girls basketball team that won multiple national championships and she described how happy she was to be done with it because as the only strait girl on the team she said it was a terrible environment. She described many inappropriate situations she was exposed too and could never speak up. I wonder if anyone has stories about the WNBA that cant be said because they feel theyll be labeled as something wrong?
I was friends with a girl who played in a lower tier collegiate team but was as feminine as they come and married to boot. I was friendly with her husband as well and he used to joke all the time about how girls on the team had crushes on his wife and he could get hooked up with free stuff at places they worked because of it, they took it in stride though, and being college and 25 years ago I never heard of anything hostile.
There's only been one player who ever has come out and said anything about how hostile the WNBA, that I know of, and that's Candice Wiggins and guess what everyone ignored and continues to ignore the story but here is one of the few places that actually wrote about it.
“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply.
“There was a lot of jealousy and competition, and we’re all fighting for crumbs,” Wiggins said. “The way I looked, the way I played – those things contributed to the tension.
“People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’ “
Great article. If I were editing your copy I would have said that the last sentence would have better rhythm striking the happens to: It’s a good-looking young person who thinks like one.
I want to be optimistic and believe that these will crash and burn within 10 years just like other early 2010’s era startups but the reliance on revenue from gambling makes me think that this is unfortunately going to stick.
Also I feel like we need to acknowledge that TikTokers are incentivized to game an algorithm that’s effectively run by the CCP.
Well this was depressing.
Yes, it was.
It’s wild how pro sports and everything it touches has shrunken down to a series of joyless transactions. I hate it here.
Some brave commenter needs to point out that the Cavinder twins are athlete-hot and not hot-hot, so that we can talk about how this *should* diminish their post-basketball appeal, but apparently doesn’t.
Yeah I will be that idiotic person who is going to get attacked………
but I don’t find them particularly attractive. They are young and fit and put a lot of effort into their appearance. That is both worth a lot, and not really the same thing.
Twins is hot I guess.
Yeah, it's definitely Cheerleader Effect. I'm glad I'm not the only one here who doesn't find them particularly hot.
There is something about not being *only* an Instagram model that seems to have an effect here, but I can’t quite put into words what’s going on. I’m not sure if it’s maybe some kind of plausible deniability -- not in the sense that you are trying to hide from your wife why you like them, but in the sense that you feel maybe less of a mook to yourself if you follow them? If you’re ogling Olivia Dunne, she got into that outfit for gymnastics purposes, not just to be softcore porn, right? Right?
For a second there I was shook thinking Ethan might be the guy with the ponytail and glasses that walks in until I looked up his picture online.
And the idea that soft-core twins are being used to sell gambling addictions to young people on an app controlled by the CCP makes me want to launch every smartphone into the sun.
It’s almost 8 years later and “institutions’ still have not learned that if you offer the market a steady diet of socially awkward dorks spewing insincere, bland, and prepackaged sanctimony you’ll leave a lot of space for attractive and charismatic grifters to drink your milkshake.
Sure, they are somewhat malevolent but they are halfway self aware, funny enough and just being themselves anyway. Not appealing enough to take over an industry, but enough to crash it.
Fucking gold.
Also one other thing with this - I’d wager the lifespan of these characters is much like the music industry in the 90s, useful for a bit but soon discarded for a newer, slightly younger model, rinse and repeat.
Some may be relevant for a while but most will be chewed up and spat out and have no idea how and why they aren’t ‘it’ anymore.
Exactly - “Derek” might get his own spin off soon but the rest of the J Paul/Betr crew will eventually evaporate into the algorithm
Fantastic article, as was the Free Press piece. My only comment--it was obvious to me from the get-go that the college sports NIL industry would create a "hot girl" problem in women's sports. My question--how does this begin to impact team dynamics and recruiting? Eventually, more women's teams may have to deal with a problem that has seemed to mostly plague the men's game (and certain pro sports) where the "main thing" ceases to become the "main thing."
The incentives could change.
Your team could be bad at the sport, but if you drive a lot of interest in the school b/c you have a whole team of influencers, both sides may benefit indirectly (except for the coach).
The House always wins…
(Vegas and Strauss)
It’s the same model mapped onto new technology - the big fish (Jake Paul) have their crew and minions who will eventually get their own popular channels or content farms. Is that any different from years past when popular ESPN anchors got more bites at the screen time apple? Paul’s interview show reminds me more of “The Man Show” or other early 2000s content where some of the side characters were bound to branch off and have success and the other would eventually disappear until they get summoned back to a reunion show. The fragmentation of media gives more money and opportunities to these younger personalities - but let’s not pretend like it’s going to provide longevity.
Imagine when ESPN can generate an AI pair of twin babes. They'll be hotter, nicer, smarter, and funnier than the Cavinders, and they'll never age or fuck their faces up with surgery. And for a price, you can get their pics, then hang out with them in the metaverse, then fuck them. Who needs Shirley Povich when you can virtually fuck gambling twins??
TIL I have the same model of blender as the Twins.
I didn't really get this piece. I'm not sold that the decline of The Athletic is linked to social media and influencers. Seems like two separate trends.
These twins are a pure throwback to what women have always made money at, being “really really good looking”. They are the perfect juxtaposition for Bud Light deciding to trash their companies previous decision to sell beer by putting hot women in their adds, to their own detriment.
Now unless you are playing something like women’s tennis or I suppose golf there’s just not a ton of add money for you even if your great, but that has gotten better in recent years, but then we have those women that are decent but they get a ton of ad revenue which other better players resent. I see this in Tennis (Kournikova and Sharapova come to mind) all the time, or in golf I see Paige Sp@$Kiac (I’m not looking it up) and I know she’s not great but she leans into everything and she has those attributes the superficial male seems to covet.
However the bigger story to me is why the Twins retired now because I just finished watching a ton of playoff basketball and I saw tons of unattractive WNBA players crammed down my throat why not a couple attractive NCAA women hoopers? I’d cautiously say it’s because of the optics and the NBA is as bad as Target and Bud Light at knowing their customers, as ESS has made a good living pointing out, he won’t touch this though.
The unspoken issue I wonder about is how a former WNBA player (Candace Wiggins) said about her own league, after she retired, that the lesbians resent the straight attractive women and it’s not comfortable to deal with it, the Lesbians are not tolerant women, and a cursory knowledge about the alphabet people seems to confirm this almost weekly.
I can imagine that these twins left because they realized it’s just not worth it to try to compete even at the NCAA level for the amount of harassment they probably got and would get even more if they really decided to keep playing. Or they just weren’t any good and their looks at that level had taken them as far as they could go, but can you imagine how angry the WNBA would be if they made a commercial with the Twins and not Candace Parker or Sue Bird?
Now ESS has already written about how a lot of sports leagues don’t seem to understand their base so why the hell does the NBA almost never have a commercial that doesn’t have some unattractive WNBA person in it? I only assume most are WNBA because the NBA is about as corporate genius as they come and they think that if they pound us with these unattractive women that we’ll just start buying their rubbish.
A few examples of just awful marketing that I mostly can’t tell what they were selling because I was mostly confused about what I was seeing:
- Steph Curry does a commercial with Candace Parker where she swats a phone out of his hand as if she’s Dikembe Mutombo, she’s 6 ft 4 so that means she’s probably an inch shorter, is it supposed to be funny or ironic?
- Or how about the one with Candace pimping muscle milk! Have you seen her arms, she’s got the definition of a glass of water, why not get Olive Oil while they’re at it. (It would have been better to talk about how at her age osteoporosis is a problem, as it is for a lot of older women and she needs to keep her bone density up).
- Or the woman that Mark Cuban is trying to make marketing pitches too, I have no idea who she is and won’t look it up, I’ll pass on the tube socks Mark.
-Or Sue Bird somehow using her collegiate and WNBA rings to trump Steph Curry, can anyone possibly imagine Christian Braun (ne Brown) going around and pimping his 3 high school, 1 collegiate, and now 1 NBA championship to someone like Steph, he’s got one more than you Steph.
- Maybe the second most annoying to the Muscle Milk add is the one where Jimmy Butler is getting a beer given to him by some WNBA woman talking about his air balls, he throws it back at her, and she throws it back at him, it’s just so damn stupid.
I could go on but something is really wrong with all these adds, almost as bad as the Nike add that ESS started his stack with and I could go on but fuck them.
A lot of interesting points you make there. I find myself stuck on one though, the concept that attractive or even just strait women might feel being in the WNBA would be a hostile place for them. I knew a girl years ago that played on the Oregon City high school girls basketball team that won multiple national championships and she described how happy she was to be done with it because as the only strait girl on the team she said it was a terrible environment. She described many inappropriate situations she was exposed too and could never speak up. I wonder if anyone has stories about the WNBA that cant be said because they feel theyll be labeled as something wrong?
+1. Joining the WNBA must feel like willingly entering a social/political cult.
I was friends with a girl who played in a lower tier collegiate team but was as feminine as they come and married to boot. I was friendly with her husband as well and he used to joke all the time about how girls on the team had crushes on his wife and he could get hooked up with free stuff at places they worked because of it, they took it in stride though, and being college and 25 years ago I never heard of anything hostile.
There's only been one player who ever has come out and said anything about how hostile the WNBA, that I know of, and that's Candice Wiggins and guess what everyone ignored and continues to ignore the story but here is one of the few places that actually wrote about it.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sports/sd-sp-wigginsside-20170217-story.html
“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply.
“There was a lot of jealousy and competition, and we’re all fighting for crumbs,” Wiggins said. “The way I looked, the way I played – those things contributed to the tension.
“People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’ “
Great article. If I were editing your copy I would have said that the last sentence would have better rhythm striking the happens to: It’s a good-looking young person who thinks like one.
Bullish on the extremes:
Cringe & youthful short-form video creators becoming the not only the next Stephen A. Smith's but also the Zach Lowe's...
...and the long-form, expert commentary from independent national newsletters and podcasts like House of Strauss and certain other industry leaders.
I want to be optimistic and believe that these will crash and burn within 10 years just like other early 2010’s era startups but the reliance on revenue from gambling makes me think that this is unfortunately going to stick.
Also I feel like we need to acknowledge that TikTokers are incentivized to game an algorithm that’s effectively run by the CCP.
Quite a few uk football journalists write content for gambling companies so thats one to look for