Sydney Sweeney is catching heat again, and this time it is not coming from the usual conservative-bashing crowd.
A wave of female athletes says her newest ad campaign sets women’s sports back decades.
But WNBA guard Sophie Cunningham just told the outrage mob exactly where they can shove it.
A Gambling Ad Nobody Asked Women’s Sports To Judge
Novig, a sports prediction platform, rolled out its “Just Sports” campaign on September 9, 2026, featuring Sweeney posing nearly nude with only footballs, tennis rackets, and other sports gear covering her body.
The ad suggests that the company is “just sports,” a jab at the growing prediction markets that have begun to include wagers on politics, wars and even deaths.
Female athletes did not take it well.
Four-time Olympic gold medalist Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram, “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this.”
She kept going, calling the ad “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft.”
Other current and former athletes piled on, arguing the campaign undoes years of work by women trying to be seen as competitors rather than bodies.
Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky has pushed back on that characterization, telling reporters that Sweeney drove the creative direction herself and that the company never intended to portray female sports negatively in the first place.
That has not stopped the pile-on from spreading across social media and sports commentary shows for more than a week now.
Enter Sophie Cunningham, the Indiana Fever guard who never met a controversy she was afraid to weigh in on.
Cunningham Refuses To Play Along With The Manufactured Fury
Cunningham addressed the firestorm on her podcast, “No Hesitation,” which she co-hosts with NBA trainer Drew Hanlen.
She did not pretend to love the ad itself.
“Does she even, like, does she even gamble on sports?” Cunningham asked, adding, “It’s just so unauthentic.”
But she drew a hard line between disliking an ad and joining a mob trying to shame another woman for cashing a paycheck.
“Why are girls mad?” Cunningham asked on the podcast. “That is literally what she does. Why is anyone mad? It is a gambling ad: men, sports, naked women. Of course, that’s going to draw attention.”
Cunningham then delivered the caveat that has since gone viral.
“Do I agree with it? Morally, I think it’s kind of weird,” she said, before landing on her real point: “each to their own. Go do your thing, sis.”
She was not finished defending Sweeney’s résumé either.
“She sticks to her guns, and she does her thing, and she’s her,” Cunningham said. “So, like, props to her.”
Cunningham closed her segment by pointing to a bigger picture than one ad.
“At the end of the day, I’m really loving seeing all these girls who are powerful, strong, showing young girls what it looks like to actually be an athlete,” she said.
Cunningham’s co-host Hanlen added some math to the conversation, noting that sports bettors skew heavily male, which undercuts the theory that Novig ever built this campaign to send a message to female athletes at all.
Cunningham and Sweeney are not exactly close friends, but they have crossed paths before.
The two were seen together at Phoenix Raceway in Avondale, Arizona, where Cunningham served as the honorary pace car driver for the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race, and Cunningham played for the Phoenix Mercury for several years before joining the Fever.
What This Says About Where Common Sense Still Lives In Sports
This is not Sweeney’s first rodeo with manufactured outrage.
Her American Eagle “jeans” campaign last year drew a similar firestorm from critics who accused the brand of coded messaging, and the backlash quickly became a proxy war over culture rather than a conversation about denim.
President Trump later weighed in on that earlier controversy, saying he found the American Eagle ad “fantastic” once he learned Sweeney is a registered Republican.
That reaction says something about why an actress simply doing a paid endorsement keeps becoming a flashpoint.
Sweeney is not hiding from her politics, and a segment of the entertainment and sports press treats that fact as a reason to manufacture controversy every time she shows up in an ad.
Cunningham’s response cuts through that noise in a way most athletes are too scared to attempt.
She did not lecture anyone about empowerment, she did not issue a statement through a publicist, and she did not pretend the ad was some grand feminist statement it never claimed to be.
She simply said the obvious thing: a gambling company built an ad for gamblers, most of whom are men, and acted surprised when it worked.
Women’s sports have spent years fighting for the label of “real athletics” rather than spectacle, and that fight is legitimate.
But turning every ad involving a famous woman’s body into a referendum on the entire future of women’s sports gives the outrage machine more power than a Novig commercial ever earned.
Cunningham’s willingness to say “go do your thing, sis” instead of joining the pile-on is the kind of blunt, unbothered response that a lot of fans wish more athletes would give instead of the usual scripted apology tour.
Expect more of this dynamic as Sweeney continues booking endorsement deals.
Every time she signs a new contract, a familiar cycle will likely repeat: outrage from a segment of athletes and commentators, a defense from Sweeney or her allies, and eventually the next controversy to replace it.
Cunningham just showed there is another option besides picking a side in that cycle: shrug, laugh, and move on with your own career.
Sources: Washington Times, Deadline, Yahoo Sports, Fadeaway World, Where Is The Buzz, Fox News