Finalist: Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post

ATLANTA — The New England Patriots franchise is a snarling, unkillable monster where explanations go to die. Try to define how this singular club has made nine Super Bowls in 18 seasons, and you wind up trapped in a lot of bland, meaningless generalities about “efficiency” and “execution” that don’t come close to capturing its precision-blade offensive excellence or its hand-in-the-dirt defensive violence or its pure greed for winning. Every NFL team preaches execution. So how come nobody can imitate the Patriots’ standard of it?

The most knowledgeable NFL observers struggle to analyze the sheer sustenance of their record, by what method they have maintained such a perfection-crazed level over two decades when cycles of roster turnover, burnout and strategic evolution deteriorate every other team.

“We all want to know it because everybody would like to replicate it if they knew,” says Trent Dilfer, the ex-quarterback turned NFL Network analyst who won the Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens in the 2000 season. “I’ve studied it and tried to understand it, but I’d be lying to say I totally did.”

Every NFL club is a complex organism with assets in different departments, but the Patriots more than any team in history are able to resolve all facets into performance on the field in crucial moments. Take those plays in overtime of their AFC championship game victory over the Kansas City Chiefs to reach the Super Bowl: Everyone in the stadium — and the world — knew quarterback Tom Brady would look at Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski on third and 10; they got open anyway.

“They’re always on point,” says Los Angeles Rams defensive back Aqib Talib, who played for the Patriots in 2012 and 2013 and won a Super Bowl with Denver in the 2015 season. “They throw the ball so fast, but they’re always on point. That’s so tough to do.”

The Patriots’ methods to a large extent remain in a lockbox, thanks to Coach Bill Belichick’s secretive nature: He refused to practice outdoors this week because the field was surrounded by “20-story skyscrapers” that he said offered too good a view. But some things can be gathered from former Patriots or favored broadcasters who have been inside the operation. What emerges is a portrait of a team that simply practices at a more extreme cadence than others and is zealous at even the most minor-seeming tasks. The Patriots personify an old quote from former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula, who once was asked, “Why don’t you overlook a little mistake?”

Shula answered, “What’s a little mistake?”

The Rams’ 33-year-old coach, Sean McVay, got a brief look at the Patriots in 2014 during a joint training camp workout when he was still an assistant with the Washington Redskins. McVay noticed, first of all, that there was not a single rote or apathetic moment: If a player wasn’t on the field, he was running in an individual drill with a position coach.

“If you knew nothing about football — not a thing — and you just watched them, you’d say, ‘There’s something different about that team,’ ” McVay told NBC’s Peter King last week.

McVay left the practice with one thought: “That’s what it looks like when it’s done right.”

The great Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Reggie Wayne spent 11 days with the Patriots in 2015 as a free agent at the end of his career before deciding to retire. Wayne was a champion worker in his own right, part of a Super Bowl team under Coach Tony Dungy in the 2006 season. But in his few days with the Patriots he was struck by the absoluteness of their concentration and absorption with details that might become critical inflection points in big games. In one 45-minute meeting on “situational football,” they reviewed not only the two-minute offense but exactly how players should give the ball to the referee between plays.

“Lot of guys, you see them toss the ball to the ref,” Wayne says. Not the Patriots. “You don’t know if the ref can catch or not, so if they drop that ball and it’s bouncing around, that’s time running off the clock.” The Patriots were drilled to sprint to the ref and hand it to him, to get a quicker spot and save a second. They would “go over and over and over it,” Wayne said, and didn’t seem to resent the monotony.

The conservation of time begins the moment they walk in the building.

“Look, if you show up one minute late, they just tell you to go home for the day,” says former New York Giants Super Bowl quarterback and CBS analyst Phil Simms, a Belichick confidante. The Patriots “set more alarms” than other teams, Talib says, all in the name of “habits.” The time sacrifice requires such cooperation from spouses that safety Devin McCourty said his wife tells him: “Go watch film. I want to go to the Super Bowl. I’ve got the kids.” Brady remarked this week that he has spent more time with Belichick in his life “than with my parents.”

That’s confirmed by Willie McGinest, defensive cornerstone of the Patriots’ 2001, 2003 and 2004 Super Bowl-winning teams. He used to try to beat Belichick to the office. “I would get there at 5 in the morning,” McGinest says. “Once he heard I was coming in, he would be there at 4:30.” The sense of urgency permeates the building, he says, down to the laundry staff. “If the uniform guy don’t have the uniforms straight and ready to go, somebody’s on his ass,” McGinest says.

The same is true on the practice field, where staccato-shouting coaches continually clean up slippage in the technique of the most blooded veterans.

“You go to their practices, they’re always setting something straight,” CBS analyst Boomer Esiason says. “Bill will walk over and say, ‘How many times do we got to tell you, stay on the outside, stay on the outside.’ ”

When there is a mental mistake, there is no happy talk about it from Belichick. It’s not a franchise for high-priced egos that need flattery.

“If they do, probably the New England Patriots is not the place for them,” Belichick says before pausing. “Look, I think it’s just about being honest. I don’t think you tell somebody they did a good job when they didn’t do a good job. I think if they do a good job, you tell them they did a good job. If they didn’t do a good job, I think you tell them, ‘Here’s what you need to do better.’ I don’t believe in lying to a player.”

By all accounts, the Patriots’ ticktock urgency is coupled with an intense physicality in practice few other teams are willing to risk. Simms says of Belichick, “If he could, their ass would be in pads every week.” McGinest recalls that frequently defensive starters would act as the scout team against Brady’s offense, mimicking the opponent “because we wanted them to see what it was really going to look like in a game. We would give them their first look — and we would give them a full-speed look.”

Simms witnessed a practice two years ago, as the Patriots were readying to play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2016 AFC championship game. Simms was “shocked at the pace,” given that it was the postseason, and at the fierceness with which they went at each other. On one play, Brady threw a pass out to Edelman, his close friend and favorite target. It was a bad throw that tailed into the dirt. Edelmen dived down to get it, caught his cleats in the grass and face-planted in the turf. He got up with a clod of dirt in his face mask and began cursing Brady for lousy execution.

“What did you say?!” Brady snapped at him, and the two men went helmet to helmet and began screaming at each other.

“That’s just how they are,” Simms says. “Then I heard Bill ran ’em a lot after practice.”

They beat the Steelers, 36-17.

Belichick sets the basic template and schedule, but somewhere along the line the Patriots players adopt it as theirs, and pride in execution becomes a partnership that has won at least 10 games every season since 2003.

“It’s certainly not the easiest place to play,” special teams captain Matthew Slater says, “but it works for us because of the buy-in. Guys are willing to check their egos at the door and say, ‘Hey, I’m in this for the greater good,’ and the guys who aren’t willing to do that usually don’t last long here. . . . So I think it’s a perfect match. Bill has the formula, and he gets the right guys to come in and do it the way he wants it done.”

The Patriots long have been accused of practicing dark arts, but there is no swallowable pill or spying or ball deflation ploy that is a shortcut to their substance. Their success is the result of manifold parts: scouting, an economist’s grasp of salary management, the discipline not to be seduced by talent and to bring in only the most intelligent players preloaded with work ethic, Belichick’s deep strategic background, and a quarterback for the ages who has played into his 40s. These are all crucial. But they’re ultimately just piecemeal factors that lead up to the collective on-field performance by players who take an incalculable pride in craft and learn to enjoy winning more than any leisure.

“When I go and spend time with them at practice, I always walk away going, ‘Well, I know why they win,’ ” Simms says. “When I go to another team, I go, ‘Uh, that’s why they are where they are, looking for another coach every third year and never winning a lot of games.’ ”

The NCAA’s latest move is all wind and stall. It’s nothing more than an attempt to slow the landslide, one that will bury the current leaders to the point of extinction. Look closely at the NCAA’s supposed grand concession to allow college athletes the rights over their own names and likenesses, and note that it contains zero specifics, an almost infinite number of potential restrictions, and doesn’t actually say anything about money. It’s the organization’s classic signature, that blowhardy nothingness.

The exact wording of the NCAA board of governors’ announcement is the giveaway. Each NCAA division is directed to “consider updates to relevant bylaws and policies for the 21st century” that would eventually allow athletes to “benefit” from their own names and images, so long as they do so “in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.” What on earth do all those soft words mean? Here’s what they don’t mean: anything imminent. Or concrete. Or real. What they do mean is that the NCAA is in a panic over a raft of legislation that would make their current piratical rules illegal.

As matters stand, the NCAA denies athletes their natural economic rights, and hijacks their names, images and likenesses for financial gain. Ohio State’s Chase Young is a star who may not sign his own autograph for money or endorse a Columbus car dealership. Rather, the money generated by his talent, celebrity and image will continue to go to pay the $600,000 salary for some mid-level associate athletic director and other cronies.

What member of a university marching band is told that they must not profit from the trumpet so long as they’re at the university? What member of a school orchestra is told they better not play their violin for money, or they’ll lose the right to perform? What young actress or actor is told they can’t appear in a play or a film for pay, at peril of being labeled “dirty” and a “cheat?” The NCAA has fundamentally violated the rights of scores of athletes by forcing them into a separate and unequal class of citizens. So, the NCAA’s announcement that it has “started the process” to “enhance” athletes’ ability to own what never should have been taken from them in the first place is not cause for congratulation.

Look closely at the NCAA’s verbiage and you will find buried in it some key phrases that show just how desperate its leaders are to delay, and to hang on to its ravening economic system. “Compensation” for anything related to “athletics performance” will still be “impermissible” — for everyone except seven-figure athletic directors, of course. Athletes will be able to benefit only from “collegiate” rather than “professional” opportunities — whatever that means. Question: Does a lemonade stands count as collegiate or professional?

In other words, the NCAA still will forbid athletes from actually making any money — unless it’s such a small and paltry amount of loose change that it’s not worth bothering over.

“The board’s action today creates a path to enhance opportunities for student-athletes while ensuring they compete against students and not professionals,” NCAA President Mark Emmert droned.

Create a path? The path was already there, created by legislators because the NCAA was so recalcitrant on this issue. California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act in September over the NCAA’s baying protest, and Florida is right on its heels. California’s law, set to take effect in 2023, would prohibit schools from punishing athletes for exercising their basic commercial rights. A dozen other states are considering similar laws. Then there is the federal measure proposed by Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) that would strip the NCAA of its tax-exempt status if it continues to restrict the use of an athlete’s name, image and likeness. Walker is trying to get the bill to a vote so it can take effect next year.

The NCAA is not trying to open a path for athletes, it’s trying to kick dirt over one.

The only reason the board of governors took this vote was because their position is utterly unsustainable. It’s simply a bid to appease lawmakers, and try to regain the reins of the rule-change process before they are legislated out of existence in their current form.

It would be purely a mistake to allow this manipulation to work. Lawmakers should keep the pressure on the NCAA, and hard, because unrelenting legal force is the only thing that revenue-bloated body has ever responded to.

Let up now, and the NCAA will spend years upon years holding “working groups,” which will issue “recommendations,” which will result in “proposals,” which will then be referred to subcommittees. And the only thing that will come from any of it is more buzzwordy blather about “models.” Meantime, the rake-off will continue and the kids who sweat to generate all the money will watch vainly as they are robbed of their natural rights over their own names, as well as the true value of their scholarship.

The NCAA has had years to make rules that genuinely benefit their “student-athletes.” They have refused, except at the point of a legal threat. What we need now are laws.

Skank whore here, checking in. Dumb ass bitch, reporting for work. After climbing through the thicket of social media insults that regularly starts the day of a woman in a sportsman’s business, I sat down to read Antonio Brown’s alleged text messages to a young woman who is accusing him of rape. It’s of course impossible to tell from the lawsuit, filed the day after he signed with the New England Patriots, whether he’s guilty of that crime. But if those texts are his, he most assuredly is guilty of using language that countenances it, and now he’s in the position of trying to explain that it was just words.

You want to be thought of as a good man falsely accused? Then don’t talk like a crude, rapacious brute. Find a different expression. Search out an articulacy, something other than the tongue-tied dead-end vulgar cough that is the word “bitch.” She’s a “lien bitch thought it was easy to get a come up.” She’s a “weak bitch” and a “fake hoe.” She and her mother, too, are “dum ass hoes.” This isn’t innocent language. To employ the phrase of Toni Morrison, it’s “mutant language designed to throttle women.”

You want the benefit of the doubt? Try talking less like a cut from “A Bitch Iz A Bitch,” and more like New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson, who just reduced Laura Ingraham to stammering in a television debate with well-stated facts. Every time I hear Watson speak or read one of his excellent blogs, I feel an overwhelming relief that reminds me of what Morrison wrote in her eulogy of James Baldwin: “In your hands language was handsome again.”

On Tuesday, I congratulated Brown for having the smarts and self-control and self-determination to get himself to the Patriots, as opposed to letting himself be powerlessly trapped on a bad team. Today, after reading the messages included in the lawsuit filed by his accuser, I feel compelled to state that I don’t know who Brown really is. I can only hope he’s innocent. But what I do know is that I’m sick of athletes (and their worshipers) who apparently never learned a primary language beyond misogyny, a language that treats women as punchable sex dolls, and excuses violence because the hoe had it coming.

I don’t know the first thing about Britney Taylor, either, whether she’s a victim or an ex looking for a settlement — Brown’s lawyer says the relationship was consensual and she wanted the player to invest $1.6 million in a business project. What I do know is that language matters. As Rebecca Solnit has written, “When you turn ‘torture’ into ‘enhanced interrogation’ . . . you break the power of language to convert meaning, to make us see, feel, and care.’” A fifth of all the “bitches” in America are raped. Feel that. Approximately 1,500 “bitches” a year are killed by male partners, and studies show that prostitution, or “hoeing” in his parlance, is the riskiest occupation in the United States when it comes to violence. Feel it.

For decades now I’ve written about pro athletes with an interest and respect that borders on reverence, and always wanted to err sympathetically on their side — for their ability to turn themselves over so completely to a craft, and yet their susceptibility to being used. For their exquisite physical precision and ephemeral beauty, and yet their propensity to get burned up by others. But I’ve never reconciled myself to the clumsy, casual “all my bitches” way so many of them talk, and the implacable coldness of their refusal to acknowledge the pervasive, contagious damage they do with it.

Language is a projection of personal quality. The language of “bitches” and “hoes” that so many great athletes use is exactly what it appears to be — a menacing unfeelingness, a limitedness of expression that bespeaks something insensate, a hardheartedness and determination to subjugate. This kind of language, Morrison said in her epic Nobel Prize lecture, “is ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” It is a profound failure that bespeaks nothing but thwartedness, thoughtlessness, an incapability to form even a sentence. It entraps everybody and prevents any kind of progress or understanding, and it’s as imprisoning for the speaker as much as the target.

I’ll leave it for Morrison, a far superior and more expressive writer, to finish off the thought. “Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.” This dead-end language, she compares to a medieval “suit of armor polished to shocking glitter.” It is “a husk from which the knight departed long ago,” she writes. “Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental.”

Real power doesn’t come from lifting a dumbbell or having a big office. Those are just petty little varieties of it. If you want to see real power, watch a swell coming across the ocean, an immeasurable displacement that utterly remakes the terrain. That’s what you witnessed in these U.S. Women’s World Cup champions: the gathering of real power.

Power is Megan Rapinoe, cold and still as an icefall as she eyed the Netherlands goalie before a penalty kick. “I’m made for this; I love it,” she said later. On the spot in merely the biggest tournament in the world, after taking on the president politically and calling out FIFA personally, all Rapinoe did was leg-whip all of her opponents, making her body go left while her foot went right, to put the U.S. team ahead in Sunday’s final.

Power is Rose Lavelle, slicing up the middle of the field and launching that left-footed Stinger missile of a shot that practically had a contrail for the 2-0 margin of victory. The whole team, heaving upward with the trophy in its hands while the stadium chanted: “Equal pay! Equal pay!” — that is power.

Never again should this most magnificent of American teams be shortchanged by the so-called power brokers in suits, the players treated as some kind of subsidized junior varsity who should be thankful for what they get — as opposed to the steel-toed legends they are. Alex Morgan, with all of that ominous smoothness as she moves toward the goal. Crystal Dunn, with those heel-kicking cutbacks and tackles, sliding to stifle the opposition time after time. Power.

Power is taking an epic shot, betting on yourself the way these players did and then coming through. They sued, filing a headliner of a pay discrimination suit against U.S. Soccer just three months before the World Cup. Then, with the massive burden of expectations on their supremely confident backs, they went out and gave the world a lesson in pure unadulterated clout. They swept through the tournament like a tremendous swell, carrying ever-bigger global TV audiences with them as they went, scoring a record 26 goals while giving up just three.

So now the gentlemen at U.S. Soccer can explain to a lawsuit mediator — as well as Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Curry, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Ellen DeGeneres, Bette Midler, Ryan Seacrest, most of Congress and all of this team’s other admirers — exactly why these women deserve less in performance bonuses and appearance fees than a men’s team that has never won jack.

“Everyone is kind of asking what’s next and what we want to come of all of this,” Rapinoe said. “It’s to stop having the conversation about equal pay and are we worth it.”

For so long, male sports bureaucrats have acted as though women’s sports is a blackmailed concession to social engineering. The gents at U.S. Soccer and FIFA seem to think they granted these women a favor and allowed them to grow the game out of sheer benevolence. In fact, these organizations have been grudging obstacles every single step of the way, declining to adequately promote the game despite clear evidence of a vast new audience and revenue. For pure obstructive pettiness, how about this? As of 2016, U.S. Soccer was still giving men’s players $75 a day in meal money while paying the women $60.

This is power: Goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, tautly muscled and flying through the air like a paratrooper. Tobin Heath and Julie Ertz and Carli Lloyd and Christen Press, playing the ball like jazz on their shoe tops. They were genial and beautiful and blisteringly smart and totally imperturbable under pressure — and the damndest thing you’ve ever seen on a field. Power.

Here’s the truth: Women in the workplace get pretty much nowhere until a group such as this comes along and pops some new muscle. For some reason it’s the only thing that male deciders take as proof of competence, the only thing that convinces them that women have enough cold steel in them to drive companies or serve on aircraft carriers. Every time a women’s team wins another gold medal, it helps other women enter a new space, move up to a higher suite. And when they enter that new space, they change it forever — and not just by improving the language and table manners. It “removes the lurking question of the impossibility of an ambition,” Susan Hockfield, a neuroscientist who was the first woman to serve as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, once said. To borrow a phrase from Condoleezza Rice, they make “the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect.” That’s power.

A victory such as this does something much bigger than just hand a few women a trophy. “It gives everyone permission,” Billie Jean King has said. This is the real source of the dynamism in the U.S. women’s soccer tradition — and it is a tradition now. The U.S. squad has always played with the consciousness that it was about other women and not just the team. The great Mia Hamm-led ’99ers, who really built this city, explicitly passed that message to the younger players, and it’s why the program has such an infinite capacity for rejuvenation no matter how the cast changes, with four Olympic gold medals and four World Cups now, and no sign of its ambition flagging.

Everyone who enters the program understands she is expected to perform with a certain ethic: to handle discrimination with equanimity while charging across lines that previously seemed impassable, and to do so without an audible word of complaint that life isn’t fair. When they were asked if they could fight a discriminatory pay suit and still play quality World Cup soccer, Ali Krieger answered: “Women can multitask. Imagine that; we can do two things at once.”

These players didn’t ask for anyone to play violins for them. They just snatched the violin away and bashed it all to pieces. It’s a philosophy summed up by the late Nora Ephron: “Be the heroine of your own life, not the victim,” she said. That’s power.

Megan Rapinoe and her unapologetically sinewy colleagues make you forget politics and categories. These are no first-wave, third-wave, millennial, post-colonial, post-structural, modern-eco marchers, boneless and aggrieved. Protesters aren’t supposed to be this ungrim and prancing, are they? There was Rapinoe, exulting in her pure, self-driven dynamism and radiant in her cause, striking that pose like Diana Prince discovering she’s Wonder Woman: “I have no father. I was brought to life by Zeus!”

It’s time to discard, finally, the nagging, jersey-tugging, chronic, small-minded doctrine that we must “contextualize” everything the U.S. women’s national team does as “relative” to the men’s game, and therefore they must be smaller, lesser. Sweet kicking Jesus, what titans these players are. Mental giants who show up big under unimaginably hot lights of controversy. Drivers of explosive new TV ratings, not just in America but in France, England, Germany, Brazil, Italy, with a billion viewers predicted by the end of the tournament.

All they’ve done is basically build a worldwide sport in less than two decades. The NFL needed 100 years to get into the public consciousness this way, the NBA 75. How about, just once, we marvel at what this women’s program has accomplished without all the “yeah buts.”

In a way, the tired old equity debates in women’s sports have always been misplaced, off point, anyway. As Germaine Greer has asked, “Equality — with what?” The lame idea of sameness is actually a “profoundly conservative goal” for women. Replicating male sports structures with their baked-in disenfranchisement of athletes in favor of “owners,” with their lousy assumptions and values, has never been what the women in the U.S. soccer program were really interested in. That’s not why team captain Julie Foudy first consulted with Billie Jean King back in 1999 about how to game-change. “The Kinger,” Foudy calls her, with that easy irreverence that always has been the program’s signature.

They’re after something far, far more subversive than just better pay. Ever since Brandi Chastain whipped off her jersey and displayed her “Fight Club” torso back in 1999, the audience has understood this team as revolutionary. They’re more than just plaintiffs suing over discrimination. They play the game as a form of incursion, as a battle for female sovereignty, and so the stakes have always been higher for them than just the final score. This creates chronic pressure to perform at the highest level, and they deal with and even welcome that pressure as a valuable trial in its own right.

“Some teams will visit pressure,” Coach Jill Ellis said so eloquently. “But we live there.”

Instead of wilting, they use it, to develop a deep culture of sustained excellence that male deciders always seem to be talking about in how-to leadership books but so rarely create, instead producing toxic workplaces. Four Olympic gold medals and three World Cup titles since 1991. You want a comparison with male teams? How about the New England Patriots or Green Bay Packers? They’re the only ones that really apply.

“Rapinoe is the truth,” Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes tweeted.

Not that she needed his approval, but it’s interesting the respect this team gets from male superstars.

What they’ve really been after, all these years, is the seeding of a whole new generation of female heroes, who can turn a president’s criticism into a grass stain. Rapinoe “should WIN first before she talks!” President Trump tweeted. All she did in response was deck him in his golf gut with two breathtaking goals in the World Cup quarterfinals and pose for the thundering crowd like a Pavlova.

“Purple-Haired Lesbian Goddess Flattens France Like A Crepe” read the headline on Deadspin. Afterward, her partner, Sue Bird, the immortal WNBA point guard, posted an Instagram video of Rapinoe to the song “Walk It, Talk It,” along with a cartoon of Trump’s face.

Now, whatever your politics, admit it: You’ve never in your life seen anyone handle herself so lightly under the burden of performance.

Real power is self-ownership — uncomplaining, unwhining pleasure in self-fashioning and rejecting victimhood. That’s what Rapinoe has, and it’s worth admiring no matter how much you may disagree with her specifics. The audience senses the strength of that self-ownership, and it’s why that audience keeps growing no matter Rapinoe’s trip-wire quarrels with the White House, or her self-professed “fabulous” gayness, or her expletives. Rapinoe did with Trump what an entire league of billionaire NFL owners couldn’t. She handled that guy.

Whether Rapinoe and company win on the equal-pay issue is actually irrelevant to their status. They don’t need to win a court battle; they’ve already conquered the world. Pay in women’s sports will be an ongoing quixotic battle, for the simple reason that FIFA, just like the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA, is a fundamentally corrupt machine that cheats all athletes of their rightful revenue, and merely women worse than all the rest.

The men’s World Cup is 90 years old, so it’s not surprising that it has commanded four times the viewership of the women’s event. But as Marina Hyde of the Guardian pointed out last week, that hardly justifies why FIFA hands men 13 times the prize money. There is no curing these rotten old financial abusers or winning real justice from them. Only the criminal authorities can do that.

This team is pursuing an insurrection in which its opponents are actually its secret teammates, in which the bureaucratic controls over the marketplace by a bunch of corrupt suit jackets can be blown to bits by a massive new international population of muscular young women who play for one another, for their own reasons and approval, building on their own new inimitable brand of strength, and who have an ownership that no one can touch.

FIFA and U.S. Soccer may pay this team, but they do not run it or rule it. They never have and never will. It is the first truly woman-owned franchise in sports history.

LeBron James and the rest of the NBA need to decide which audience they value more, the Chinese one or the American one. The choice is stark, and no amount of confusing the issue with cultural relativism and talk of rudeness to the host can obscure it. They can either quit being active exporters of China’s stifling repression or lose the goodwill of their fellow citizens. It’s a choice that matters a lot more than whether one athlete should shut up and dribble.

James is hardly the first person to be caught in the moral thicket of business with China and come off looking unpardonably wrong or weak. Nobel economist Milton Friedman got there long before he did. So did the CEOs of General Electric, McDonald’s, VISA, Marriott and the Gap. James is merely the latest and most prominent practitioner of self-censorship, a nifty little thing that Chinese president Xi Jinping specializes in coercing from unsuspecting naifs before sending them off to be cheerful ambassadors of baton despotism. Can we please stop confusing free markets with freedom and admit that we aren’t changing China? To the contrary, if we aren’t careful, China will change us.

James deserves the outrage he has invited, but it’s vital to recognize he’s just another American patsy to the Chinese party-state along with his entire league and he has displayed no more or less wisdom and courage than Disney executives or the International Olympic Committee. China experts and the country’s own dissidents increasingly recognize that China has gone “transnational” with its tyrannies, flexing itself not just in domestic crackdowns but in a “massive outreach programme,” in the words of Eva Pils, author of the 2017 book “Human Rights in China.”

It strikes collaborative deals with overseas businesses and organizations and then makes those institutions indebted to the Chinese government for permissions — thereby forcing acceptance of outrageous practices in previously democratic places. Thus, the IOC tolerates Chinese slave labor to build stadiums and the bugging of hotels during the Games. And soon the virus gets carried overseas, buried in a chip or in the mouth of a ballplayer.

James took rationalization for the China regime’s behavior across the border and back home, just as its leaders hoped he would — and that’s a dangerous thing to carry through passport control. More dangerous than he even realizes.

Instead of defending unfettered freedom of expression, a value he has championed so boldly in his marketing campaigns, James suddenly went all morally relativistic and suggested we should be “educated” before we speak aloud about China. He put the blame on Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey for his tweet supporting pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. As opposed to club-wielding authorities beating down protesters trying to protect Hong Kong’s judicial independence. Or Xi Jinping, who on Sunday threatened, “Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.”

Better be careful with free speech, James warned, because “there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.”

Teng Biao, a prominent dissident lawyer who fled China five years ago after detentions and now teaches at Hunter College, pointed out that the Jinping regime’s “outreach” has included kidnapping dissidents on foreign soil, including in Australia and Canada, for forced repatriation. The U.S. State Department has expressed fear it could happen here. There is nothing harmless about the complicit silence of Americans doing business in China, and the assumption that their human rights abuses only happen a world away is dead wrong.

“China is becoming more and more oppressive on other international states and not listening to any criticism,” Teng said. “The Chinese government wants to silence the critics and wants to export its own narrative and its own soft power and sharp power.”

The NBA’s strategy in China of groveling apology followed by concerted silence is not just gutless or calculating. Worse, it’s based on a clinging starry-eyed belief that capitalism will somehow someday democratize China. As it happens, the league should consider that the opposite is what’s really occurring. The NBA, like every other American business, has become prey to certain fallacies perpetrated by the Chinese party-state. One fallacy, as Pils has noted, is that lobbying for human rights reforms in China is a form of insulting “cultural imperialism.” Another is that the Chinese government can be excused for its policies because it has “lifted millions out of poverty.” As if un-poverty isn’t possible without un-freedom, without beatings and torture and displacing millions.

Friedman was absolutely sure the free market was the insurer of freedom. One of his favorite examples was how the Hollywood Blacklist ended with an Academy Award for the film “The Brave One.” It had been ghostwritten by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten who was jailed and ostracized for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When it was revealed that Trumbo was the real writer of “The Brave One,” the producer defended himself by saying, “We have an obligation to our stockholders to buy the best script we can.”

The Blacklist, Friedman said, was “a thoroughly unfree act that destroys freedom.” But it ultimately didn’t work, he argued, “precisely because the market made it costly for people to preserve the blacklist.”

But with China, the script has flipped. The market has made it costly for people to preserve free speech. We, who are free, are committing thoroughly unfree acts for the sake of that market.

Hundreds of American companies are self-censoring to preserve access to the enormous Chinese consumer market. The NBA, like all the others, is in China because it is obsessed with “growth.” But is growth the best benchmark of prosperity? General Electric proved that you can grow a great American company to death. And corporate leaders these days understand that investors and customers increasingly want to feel that a company is not just growing but doing some good — or, at least, not despoiling. That might account for the size and persistence of the firestorm the NBA finds itself in.

There is a special disgust in the American audience toward the NBA right now. Why? Why should we mind the silence and complicity of a basketball league so much more than we do that of the Marriott hotel chain? Why is it so upsetting to hear LeBron James toady to China?

Perhaps because we expected him to be braver than the average salary-clawing suit. Perhaps because all Americans feel like stakeholders in their favorite teams, which is a kind of ownership even if we don’t have stock, and that makes them unique cultural carriers of our values. And just maybe, for all of our tired, swamp-sickened, realpolitik, world-weary cynicism, we don’t like to see those values betrayed for a damn buck.

Figure skating costumes are such ludicrous contrivances that Johnny Weir once likened his competitive get-up to “an icicle on coke.” It should not have to be stated that Holocaust concentration camp stripes do not belong in this cultural arena, that they are profoundly out of place in an ice rink next to chiffon and feathers wafting on gusts of fake emotion. But this is figure skating we’re talking about, a sport apparently more sensitive to a ruined shoulder-line than to using Auschwitz as fashion accessory.

Anton Shulepov is a 23-year-old skater who has been raised in this highly insular, superficial culture, so he apparently didn’t know better than to skate to the music from “Schindler’s List” in a costume that was half-Nazi camp guard and half-doomed Jew with a yellow Star of David on his chest. Surely some worldly adult should have stepped forward and told him: “Stop it. Stop the music. The extermination of six million people for how they prayed is not a subject to treat with theatrical flamboyance.” But nobody in skating did that. Instead, they nominated him for a prize for “best costume.”

Does it seem pretty trivial, a figure skating costume? That’s exactly the problem. It diminutizes the subject. Some designer thought it was a good idea to dress Shulepov this way. Someone actually said, “Let’s put him in something holocausty and genocidy to go with the theme.” And so, a young skater with no conception of the original crimes sailed around the ice and turned the Holocaust into “essentially a prop,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League.

The resulting outcry forced the International Skating Union to issue an apology this week for the “bad sentiments” caused by the costume and its nomination for an award. At the same time, the sport’s governing body offered a thoroughly insincere defense. It was all a misunderstanding, the ISU said. It was Shulepov’s other costume, the one from his short program, that “should have been presented for voting.” Riiiiiight. It was the black turtleneck they meant to nominate.

The ISU’s excuse would be more believable if this sort of thing weren’t so common in skating. In the past few years, the tasteless use of catastrophe-as-ornament has become rampant. One young lady at the world championships skated to a soundtrack that included real audio and sirens from the Sept. 11 attacks. Two ice dancers dressed up like Aborigines. A French couple sailed onto the ice in clothing smeared with fake blood and ash to skate to “Les Misérables.” What’s next? Skating to “Strange Fruit” in hemp?

Yet figure skating also can be so creative that it’s a near art. Confession: It’s secretly my favorite sport. The greatest athletic performances I’ve ever seen have come on the ice, where the championship moment is intensified by the magnificent disguising of the athleticism, the effort of the strenuous leaps and spins landing on a knife blade cloaked in musicality and fabric. Brian Boitano as Napoleon, Gordeeva and Grinkov to “Moonlight Sonata,” Katarina Witt’s “Carmen.” No athletes have soared higher in my memory.

The Washington Post’s indelibly great fashion commentator, Robin Givhan, has pointed out that when clothing “stops being a direct dialogue about hemlines and silhouettes and turns into something that is impressionistic and even poetic, it works its magic in the subconscious, drawing out the good and the bad.”

Something like that happens with the athletic body in skating. It’s the most ephemeral and yet strong human performance in all of sport, and the costuming is part of creating the illusion, of covering the raw muscle. That’s not a bad thing.

The point here is not to strangle competitive daring or creativity, and say that skaters should only perform to Puccini and Gershwin in safe taupe. The question is, where do you draw the line between a thought-provoking performance, one that’s meant to be poetic tribute, and trivialization? Givhan, who has seen designers flirt with similar offenses with striped pajamas or camouflage, says: “My general feeling is that everything can be a source of inspiration for creative expression. However, with that freedom comes immense responsibility. The designer should understand the nuances of what they’re exploring, the history, the repercussions.”

What makes the score of “Schindler’s List” magnificent remembrance instead of trivial scavenging is exactly that: Every note in it sounds consecrated, from John Williams’s lamenting homage to 19th century European music to the hollow cry of the violin of Itzhak Perlman, son of Polish Jews, drawing his bow like a sword through your heart. No wonder so many skaters want to move to its passages. They no doubt hope it will uplift their performances.

But if you’re going to take on that music, you’d better understand and honor its meaning enough not to use the Star of David like a damn spangle.

The unpleasant irony is that there are scores of rules that govern costumes in skating, from the length of skirts and cut of trousers to beads and fringe. They’re all about technicality. None is about dignity. Skaters fashion their routines and costumes with all of the sincerity of Renaissance Festival milkmaids and less fidelity to their subject than average Civil War reenactors.

Shulepov’s costume does a certain amount of special damage, just as those Holocaust-themed Christmas ornaments on Amazon do. It contributes to the debasement of fact and the unfeelingness of denialism. It renders the terribly important event unimportant. “You diminish the singularity” of an Auschwitz, Greenblatt says, when you use it “to accessorize something banal.”

What the Olympics need is a clean start. By that I don’t mean a “pure” start, as opposed to a “dirty” one, or any of the other uselessly simplistic terms used by the World Anti-Doping Agency to perpetuate its junk science. I mean a complete philosophical, ethical and scientific rethinking. The kind resisted by conflict of interest-riddled anti-doping bureaucrats, whose superficial “banning” of Russia from competition would be more meaningful if WADA was any better than, well, Russia. What you have here is a battle between crooked cops and creeps, with a lot of athletes caught in between.

To begin with, WADA has not really banned Russia from the Tokyo Games; it has merely banned its song and its flag. A melody and a swatch of cloth — that is the perfect gesture from an organization dedicated solely to cosmetics and buttocks-covering. Scores of individual Russian athletes still can compete — and rightly so, given that they may have been non-complicit, victimized by a state-sponsored system or simply unwitting violators of a nonsensical banned list bereft of any scientific worth. WADA is not fit to sort out the guilty from the bystanders. It’s just another bad actor.

More importantly, it is a tainted instrument, the results and judgments of which cannot be trusted. No one can be happy with Russia’s conduct — state doping is a human rights scourge — but WADA is simply not a legitimate adjudicator. It was never designed by the International Olympic Committee to go after powerful states or a state-sanctioned apparatus such as the U.S. Olympic Committee, which presided over a child molestation coverup that makes Russian doping look benign. The IOC founded WADA purposely to focus guilt on individual athletes — and shift attention away from guilty governing bodies.

Russia’s latest supposed transgression was to send “manipulated” or incomplete lab data to the doping agency. How is that very different from WADA’s own unethical conduct over its repeated lab failures? Or false-guilt travesties such as the meldonium controversy?

“It should be obvious that if anti-doping regulations are to work, they have to be evidence-based and based in science, and follow due process,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado scientist and author of “The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.”

WADA fails on all three counts, with a broad and growing “body of evidence of sloppy science and questionable quality control” according to Pielke. There is the case of Erik Tysse, a Norwegian racewalker who was penalized in 2011 for using an EPO-like substance. A team of Norwegian scientists has since documented that the data from a WADA lab in Rome “lacked rigor, quality and reproductibility” and, more importantly, that WADA presented manipulated images of a urine test during the appeals phase, which seemed calculated to look more guilty.

There was the Saudi Arabian soccer player Alaa Al-Kowaibki, wrongly convicted by a WADA lab notorious for erroneous readings, who served a year’s suspension and lived with the tar of “doper” on his record for six years until 2017, because WADA didn’t bother to correct the record, even though it knew it was a false result.

Irish sprinter Steven Colvert was banned in 2014 though multiple experts found the WADA lab’s reading of recombinant EPO in his urine so bizarre that it must have resulted from sheer incompetence. When Colvert asked that his samples be retested given the conflicting findings, he found they had been destroyed. The nonsense goes on and on. More than a dozen of WADA’s 35 labs have been suspended or lost accreditation because of bad work.

Before you damn Russia, consider how WADA wreaked such reputational havoc over meldonium with no cause. More than 300 substances are on WADA’s banned list, and “there is very little evidence for performance-enhancement for most of them,” Pielke said. Meldonium is one of them, a heart medication that landed on the list via rumor and suspicion because Eastern European athletes were apparently using it en masse. Doctors in that part of the world believe heavy training can cause heart damage. There is not a shred of evidence that meldonium provides a performance benefit; on the contrary, doping experts such as Don Catlin say it has zero effect. Yet more than 100 athletes, many of them Russian, were branded dopers by WADA, based on nothing at all.

This is not science. Science is systematic, rigorous, empirical, observational, transparent, evidence-based and procedurally sound, with conclusions double-checked. This is a mess.

This spring, Pielke and colleague Erik Boye of Oslo University published a summary of the mess in an academic paper, “Scientific Integrity and Anti-Doping Regulation,” in the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics. They wrote: “In the absence of reliable evidence, decision-making often becomes arbitrary, inconsistent and irreproducible, which threatens the integrity of anti-doping decision-making, the due process rights of athletes and the sustainability of anti-doping efforts.”

In place of this mess, imagine what would happen if we did the following: (1) declared a period of total amnesty during which a panel of fully independent scientists reevaluated WADA’s absurd list and its shoddy problematic laboratories; and (2) conducted a full-immunity survey of athletes as to what they take, when and why, and what deterrence methods they find effective and would like to see in place to regulate themselves and their peers.

This would not please the moralizing careerists who push anti-doping’s corrupt, dead-end system, such as USADA’s Travis Tygart, whose attitude has long been, “When in doubt, punish the innocent.” WADA and USADA need lots of guilty parties to justify their jobs and budgets. But it actually might get us somewhere in persuading young people not to take stuff.

The lack of scientific scruple at WADA (and its subsidiaries) can be seen in a simple fact: It has never published a doping-prevalence study. Prevalence data is critical for any evidence-based understanding of the problem: How many athletes are using performance-enhancers, and are WADA methods working? We don’t know, and neither does WADA, because it doesn’t ask, or when it does, it conveniently buries inconvenient data. “It’s willful ignorance,” Pielke said.

For example, in 2011, it funded anonymous surveys at two elite track and field events. Those surveys showed 57 percent of the athletes admitted to using a banned substance in the previous 12 months. WADA blocked the release of the results for years, perhaps understandably, because the numbers suggested WADA’s very profitable testing system isn’t working — at all. Only about 1 to 2 percent of WADA tests are positive. All the rest go uncaught. In other words, WADA may be failing at a better than 50-1 pace.

Without good science and real data, all WADA is doing is “a lot of shadow-chasing,” Pielke said.

It’s just a lot of meaningless arm-waving with flags.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The fervor of the hometown fans painted this frozen brown tundra red — and not just any red, either, but a bold primary color, the most vivid red imaginable, the kind of red that came from a heart artery. Even the opera house and the statues in the plazas wore Kansas City Chiefs red, and as far as the eye could see outside Arrowhead Stadium, the tailgaters huddled over their burning red coals while a frigid plains wind blew the barbecue smoke sideways.

But all that red became the color of heartbreak because this AFC championship game turned on a coin flip in overtime that put the ball in the hands of Tom Brady and the drably immortal New England Patriots.

That’s what it came down to after all the things overturned and squandered, the weird switchbacks in momentum and penalty-aided drives, the spectacular snaring catches and tipped-ball interceptions, and above all the sorcery of that man in red, Patrick Mahomes, who spun things out of nothing to rally his Chiefs from a 10-point deficit in the fourth quarter. That quarter rendered all that came before it so irrelevant and included four lead changes before that classic, inexorable, 75-yard drive by Brady and the Patriots settled it, 37-31, in overtime. “It took everything,” Brady said.

New England was a defiant and uncannily tough outfit, an organization that managed to feel as if “the odds were stacked against us,” as Brady said, even though it will be going to its ninth Super Bowl since he was drafted in 2000 and has been playing for championships for “my entire life pretty much,” the 23-year-old Mahomes said. The Patriots battled the cold and all that howling red and a large measure of doubt: For all their success, they hadn’t won a road playoff game since 2007, and plenty of people said their day was done. But “give us a ball and a field, and we’ll be there,” linebacker Dont’a Hightower had said.

It wasn’t a great game. It was a strange game, made stranger by some incoherent officiating and untimely yellow flags, which included a phantom roughing-the-passer call on which the Chiefs apparently mussed Brady’s ascot. But it was a great dynamic, a classic on-field narrative between bold youth and aged maturity. It matched an electric shock of a young man in Mahomes, who was playing in just his 19th NFL game, and the 41-year-old Brady, who is going for his sixth Super Bowl title and who looked so timelessly statuesque on that final drive that he should have been wearing a tuxedo.

They went at two different paces, in two different styles. Mahomes was quicker, more improvisational, jazz. With that upturned pixie smile and sprig of hair and crazy loose power line of an arm and indefatigable confidence, he was the most alive player on the field. He brought the Chiefs so tantalizingly close that it left them with “an ache,” Coach Andy Reid said.

Brady, by contrast, was sedate, unhurried and unhassled, even as he weathered two interceptions and the game’s major reversals and the Chiefs’ comebacks time and again. The Patriots had a magnificent first quarter in which they held Mahomes and the Chiefs to just 32 yards. Their best defense was their offense, which kept the kid off the field as the Patriots dominated the ball for more than 21 minutes of the first half to lead 14-0.

But in the second half, Mahomes performed like the genius kid who cribs for the test and gets an A. The Chiefs came out of the tunnel to score so quickly that it snatched the breath out of your throat, Mahomes covering the final 66 yards in just two plays through the air. The kid was a show within the show, wriggling out of the clutches of the Patriots time and again, jerking a shoe or a shoulder away from a defender to launch big parabolas downfield or make a throw from his belt.

The teams combined for six scores in the fourth quarter, including four in the final 3:32.

After so many debatable plays and arguable events, it came down to that coin toss. As soon as it came up heads to give Brady and the Patriots the first possession in overtime, safety Devin McCourty believed they had it won. “I saw this before,” he thought. “I know what happens at the end of this one.”

That unhurried rhythm of Brady’s took over again. “You got any touchdown plays left on that call sheet?” Brady asked offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels lightly, before he jogged back on the field.

“I do,” McDaniels answered.

But it was Brady who made the calls work, who stood there so composedly three times on third and 10, only to unfurl those languid-seeming throws, two to Julian Edelman and one to Rob Gronkowski, before Rex Burkhead finally finished the thing off with his two-yard punch into the end zone.

“It’s in his DNA,” Edelman said. “If there is a clutch gene, he’s got it.”

What Mahomes and Brady had in common from their opposite ends of the age spectrum was their wholeheartedness, their heedless exhaustion of themselves. That was worth closely attending to, amid all the frantic action around them — the size of their wagers upon themselves, their lack of hesitancy on that frozen gaming table. Underneath their performances was the willingness to court pain and inner mortification. “It hurts,” Mahomes said simply afterward. Which is of course the price that lies at the end of any heartfelt undertaking.