Pat Forde Complains About Fairness In College Football, But Has No Issue With Daughter Losing To Lia Thomas

Sports Illustrated writer Pat Forde can take time out of his day to talk about how unfair college football is, but can't seem to find the time to do the same when it comes to a situation that directly impacted his own daughter.

Pat Forde is a coward.

Forde, the ringleader for the group of sports ‘journalists’ who actually hate sports, can not fathom the fact that the SEC and Big Ten are reportedly pushing for four automatic bids from each conference into the 2026 College Football Playoff. Discussions about this are set to take place during meetings in Nashville later this month.

In his latest whiny column, Forde compared the SEC and Big Ten meetings to George Orwell's Animal Farm, the 1945 novel about a dictator pig named Napoleon taking over a farm originally built on the idea that ‘all animals are equal.’ Shockingly, Forde didn't liken Donald Trump to a dictator in the column.

Long story short, Forde doesn't understand why the two conferences want four automatic bids into the College Football Playoff when they're already dominating the sport.

"The most ridiculous aspect of all this is that the SEC and Big Ten don’t need to legislate an advantage into the playoff format," Forde wrote. "They’re going to get the most teams in, almost every year…"The fact they don’t trust themselves or the system enough to let it play out more fairly is a telling commentary on the lust for control. Don’t earn it on the field, write it into the rules."

Forde being a fan of a level playing field is something plenty of college football fans out there will agree with him on, but the issue is that his writing about fairness in sports is beyond hypocritical.

Brooke Forde, Forde's daughter, was an All-American swimmer at Stanford and earned a silver medal for the U.S. in the 2020 Olympics. In 2022, Brooke finished fourth in the women's 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Division I Championships. That women's race happened to feature a biological male, Lia Thomas, who went on to win the race by nearly two full seconds.

Brooke Forde, far right, taking a photo with Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Championships after losing to the transgender swimmer. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

Pat Forde Has Been Silent About His Daughter Losing To Trans Swimmer

One might imagine that Forde would say something, anything, about his own daughter and other female swimmers being kept off of the podium by Thomas, but instead, he hasn't said anything publicly to defend his daughter or female athletes.

In fact, all he has managed to do is criticize the common-sense-having people who have voiced frustration about a biological male competing against women.

"It is funny. Some of the folks who are really wound up about this and screaming about the fairness about women’s sports really don’t give a damn about women’s sports," Forde told Dan Wetzel in January 2022. "They are using this as a political wedge issue, and they are using it as a sign the country has absolutely run amok and has lost its mind to political correctness and blah blah blah. There are a lot of political opinions about this, but some of them are cloaked, I think, in bogus terms."

Sharing an opinion that women's sports should be exclusive to biological females and that biological men have no place in women's sports is not some "bogus term." Somehow, we've gotten to a point where sharing that opinion is controversial, and even brave, depending on who you ask.

What's most mind-numbing about Forde writing about fairness in college football is that he thinks he's making some grand discovery about the sport. It's no secret that college football is unfair. It became unfair the moment players were allowed to be paid above the table instead of under it.

Meanwhile, Forde's own daughter lost a race in the most unfair way imaginable to a biological male who began their college swimming career on the men's team, but writing about fairness in that regard seems to be entirely off-limits.