Former ESPN star makes statement on anti-trans movement

It didn’t take long for David Pollack to show where his political affiliations lie after he was let go by ESPN. It was not as much because of where he stood on the political spectrum and more so because his livelihood was tied to his words, as he explained on social media over the weekend.

A former staple on College GameDay , Pollack threw his hat into the “save women’s sports” ant-transgender movement shortly after no longer being employed as a college football analyst for the Worldwide Leader. In a quest to “end wokeness,” he kept recycling the same template over and over again.

But after living the same template Dan Orlovsky has at ESPN, Pollack opted to weigh in on a controversy that seems to have taken on a life of its own. We saw Orlovsky post and then delete a “Protect our daughters” message during the 2024 Paris Olympics boxing firestorm that involved Algerian boxer Imane Khelif , who is very much a biological woman.

In a recent interview with Barrett Media, Orlovsky explained his social media approach as an ESPN employee .

“When you’re an employee of a big company, your social media page doesn’t just get to be your social media page,” Orlovsky said. “That’s a fantasy, so you have to represent yourself and the company that you work for in the proper way.”

But as it turns out, Orlovsky was never asked about deleting the tweet, and his response was not seemingly related to that. For some reason, he waited 24 hours to tell his side of the story, but that didn’t prevent his words from taking on a life of their own.

And having taken on a life of its own, it was framed as Orlovsky deleting his tweet because it did not represent ESPN. That led to OutKick contributor and former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines calling out Orlovsky, saying that if he was afraid to say “protect our daughters,” then he was failing his daughters as a father.

But, according to Pollack, it’s not that simple.

“I’ve lived this. I get it,” he wrote. “When your livelihood is tied to your words it isn’t always as easy to speak as freely as you think.

“We all know that men don’t belong in women’s sports. All of us.”

Again, Khelif is not a male.

Pollack, recently free from what he saw as constraints at ESPN, now embraces the cause he felt he couldn’t express while an analyst on a major network. That newfound “freedom,” however, has yet to translate to nuanced conversations, as we continue to hear some of the same divisive rhetoric that’s been pushed in the “save women’s sports” movement from the get-go.

[ David Pollack ]

The post David Pollack defends Dan Orlovsky deleting ‘protect our daughters’ post: ‘I’ve lived this. I get it’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .