Sports Illustrated managed to create almost as much controversy with its choice of headline as Saturday’s game between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky generated on the court.
Indiana defeated Chicago 90-86, but the moment attracting most of the attention came during the first quarter, when Sky player DiJonai Carrington caught Fever guard Sophie Cunningham across the face with a hard foul as Cunningham drove toward the basket.
The contact reportedly left Cunningham with a bloody mouth. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded Carrington’s foul to a Flagrant 2 and ejected her.
Sports Illustrated subsequently published a story about the incident under a headline with a curious choice of words:
“Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma After Drawing Flagrant Foul in Fever-Sky.”
Karma?
That framing immediately generated criticism on social media, including from OutKick founder Clay Travis, who circulated a screenshot of the original headline.
Sports Illustrated later changed it.
The article is now headlined, “Sophie Cunningham’s Enforcer Role Gets Reversed Onto Her With Hard Foul in Fever-Sky.”
The revised version makes the intended comparison clearer. Sports Illustrated was referring to Cunningham’s own Flagrant 2 foul during a June 2025 game between Indiana and the Connecticut Sun.
Cunningham grabbed Jacy Sheldon during that game and was ejected. Sheldon subsequently joined the Chicago Sky, creating an obvious connection between the two incidents.
But there was considerably more context to the 2025 play.
Cunningham’s foul against Sheldon came after Sheldon had poked Caitlin Clark in the eye earlier in the game. Cunningham’s retaliation was widely interpreted as her acting in the “enforcer” role she had assumed for Indiana.
Sports Illustrated’s headline is “Sophie Cunningham got a bitter taste of karma” by getting clotheslined. Sports media is broken. It’s way more left wing than political media. pic.twitter.com/svrY06F0JP
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 8, 2026
There was also little ambiguity from Cunningham herself about whether she deserved punishment.
“Last year, I did the same thing, and I got kicked out,” Cunningham said while discussing Saturday’s incident. “And I deserved to be kicked out.”
That’s a rather important detail when discussing “karma.”
Cunningham isn’t arguing that she should have been allowed to retaliate against Sheldon in 2025. She acknowledges that she crossed the line and deserved her ejection. Her argument now is that Carrington likewise crossed the line and deserved to be removed.
That makes the “karma” headline unnecessarily loaded.
It suggests that Cunningham somehow had Saturday’s shot coming because of something she did more than a year earlier, rather than simply reporting that another player committed a Flagrant 2 against someone who had previously been ejected for one herself.
The two plays also occurred under different circumstances. Cunningham’s 2025 foul was an overt retaliation during the same game in which Sheldon had made contact with Clark’s eye. Saturday’s Carrington foul occurred as Cunningham was attacking the basket.
Both resulted in Flagrant 2 calls and ejections. That similarity is worth noting.
Calling one “karma” for the other goes considerably further.
There is another reason the headline attracted suspicion among Cunningham’s supporters.
Cunningham has become increasingly outspoken on cultural issues, particularly women’s sports. During a July ESPN profile, she stated her opposition to transgender athletes competing against biological females.
“I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest,” Cunningham said. “And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
That position has made Cunningham a polarizing figure well beyond basketball.
There is no evidence in the Sports Illustrated article establishing that Cunningham’s comments about transgender athletes motivated the original “karma” headline. Claiming that as fact would require evidence that hasn’t been provided.
But the headline was provocative enough without inventing an explanation for it.
A professional athlete was struck hard enough in the face for officials to assess the opponent a Flagrant 2 and eject her. Sports Illustrated chose to describe the recipient as getting a “Bitter Taste of Karma.”
Then, after the reaction arrived, the publication changed the headline.
That sequence speaks for itself.
It also comes at an awkward time for a publication whose position in American sports media has changed dramatically. Sports Illustrated was once synonymous with weekly sports journalism. Its print frequency fell to biweekly in 2018 and monthly in 2020, and the brand suffered another credibility controversy after reporting revealed AI-generated material published under fictitious author profiles.
None of that proves anything about the motives behind Saturday’s headline.
It does make editorial decisions like this one more conspicuous.
Sports Illustrated had a straightforward story available: Cunningham, known partly for serving as Indiana’s enforcer, found herself on the receiving end of a Flagrant 2 foul and watched the offending player get ejected, just as Cunningham herself had been ejected for a hard foul the previous year.
Instead, somebody decided that Cunningham had received “karma.”
The backlash came quickly enough that the publication apparently decided those words weren’t worth keeping.
