ESPYS Crowned a Courage Winner and Ignored a Story That Actually Earned It

ESPN's ratings have been collapsing for over a decade under progressive politics.

The 2026 ESPYs found new ways to dodge the courage story that mattered most.

The story ESPN skipped will make you furious once you see who it was.

A Genderless Trophy Case Shows Where ESPN's Priorities Really Sit

The 2026 ESPYs aired Wednesday night from Lincoln Center, and ESPN wasted no time proving it still doesn't know the difference between a man and a woman when a trophy is on the line.

Combine every division into one and you get Best Fighter, a single trophy that puts boxers up against mixed martial artists, and men up against women, as though weight class and gender never mattered to begin with.

Best Tennis Player works the same way. So does Best Golfer.

The network dresses this up as inclusion. It is actually the opposite. Collapsing categories means the most deserving woman in a given sport competes against men for a shot at recognition she'd have won outright a decade ago.

Caitlin Clark wasn't walking that carpet this year either. An injury-shortened season kept the reigning Best WNBA Player off the ballot, and four other players earned the nod fair and square.

Clark is the reason casual fans know the WNBA exists at all. She sold out arenas as a rookie, broke assist records, and turned a league most of the country used to ignore into appointment viewing.

Take the biggest draw in women's basketball off the stage and hand out a genderless trophy for boxers instead, and the message to the audience writes itself. ESPN would rather engineer inclusion on paper than showcase the athlete who actually built the audience.

The New York Knicks, meanwhile, swept nearly every team category they were eligible for. Best Championship Performance. Best Play. Best NBA Player. Best Team. The U.S. men's Olympic hockey team might have a word about that one.

The Courage Story ESPN Left Off the Stage

ESPN gave its Arthur Ashe Award for Courage to the late Jason Collins, the first openly gay player in a major men's American sports league, who died of brain cancer in May.

The tribute came from his twin brother and was, by every account, a genuinely emotional moment for a family that just lost someone they loved.

That's not the point. The point is what ESPN considers a defining act of courage in 2026, and what it quietly leaves off the guest list.

ESPN loves the word courage right up until courage means booking a story the network isn't comfortable promoting.

Back in March, RedState reported that several players on Iran's women's national soccer squad slipped away from their own team hotel, terrified of what awaited them back home under a government that jails, tortures, and executes dissidents for far less than what these women were risking.

They didn't get a stage at Lincoln Center. They didn't get Robin Roberts walking them out to applause. ESPN didn't build a category for women who risk their lives, their families, and their freedom just to compete somewhere the government can't reach them.

That decision says more about ESPN's priorities than any trophy handed out on that stage.

The Ratings Tell the Real Story

None of this happens in a vacuum. The ESPYs have been bleeding viewers for years, and the pattern didn't start with this year's show.

The 2025 telecast pulled in roughly 2.18 million viewers, according to Sports Media Watch, the smallest audience for the show outside the COVID-affected years since 2011. That's down from nearly 8 million when the ceremony debuted on ABC in 2013, and down from an average north of 3 million for the five years before the pandemic hit.

The Washington Examiner connected the dots on this slide years ago, arguing the collapse traces back to the network's full-throated recent embrace of progressive politics, which convinced longtime viewers the network's politics would infect its award show too.

Once burned, those viewers didn't come back. They found other ways to watch highlights, and they stopped tuning in to watch millionaires hand each other trophies for existing.

RedState's own sports desk summed up the entire spectacle for what it is: a tuxedo-clad self-administered tongue bath, dressed up as relevance.

ESPN can keep merging categories, keep picking safe narratives over hard ones, and keep congratulating itself on a stage nobody's watching. The Iranian players who risked everything to walk away from a dictatorship didn't need a trophy to prove what courage actually looks like. ESPN just needs to stop pretending it knows the difference.

Sources:

• Jerry Wilson, "RedState Sports Report: The ESPYS Highlight ESPN's Slide Into Irrelevance," RedState, July 16, 2026.
• Teri Christoph, "Five Iranian Women's Soccer Players Flee Team Hotel in Fear After Defying Brutal Regime," RedState, March 9, 2026.
• ESPN Press Room, "The 2026 ESPYS Presented by Capital One Honored Jalen Brunson, Myles Garrett, Alysa Liu, Fernando Mendoza, Shohei Ohtani, A'ja Wilson, the New York Knicks & More," ESPN Press Room, July 15, 2026.
• Sports Media Watch, "ESPY Awards Viewership Lowest Outside of COVID Since '11," Sports Media Watch, July 18, 2025.
• Washington Examiner, "The Audience for the ESPYs Has Disappeared," Washington Examiner, July 14, 2021.