Stephen A. Smith has made a very successful career out of being loud, certain, and occasionally allergic to the idea that somebody else might know more than he does. Good for him. That act pays. It gets clips. It gets outrage. It gets people yelling into their phones on the ride home. What it does not do is make his opinion matter more than the actual reality in front of him.

That brings us to the latest cable sports sermon nobody asked for, where Smith said he argued with Michael Jordan over whether NASCAR drivers are athletes. Yes, Michael Jordan. The Michael Jordan who co-owns 23XI Racing with Denny Hamlin and has been invested in NASCAR for years.

Smith said on SiriusXM, “You know who wanted to correct me about the NASCAR thing? Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan. I argued with him! Because that’s how I feel! I’m being honest. That’s how I feel. That’s all, it’s not a crime. That’s what makes radio and sports talk.”

And there it is. That is the whole Stephen A. experience in one neat little package. Facts? Optional. Expertise? Nice if available, not required. Volume? Cranked to the ceiling. Smith is famous, sure. Widely loved? Not exactly. He is more widely tolerated, mocked, clipped, debated, and used as background noise for people folding laundry than he is universally respected as some final authority on sports truth. His opinions are loud. Loud does not mean binding.

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The better part of this story is not even Stephen A. stubbornly doing his usual “I feel this way, therefore the universe must adjust” routine. It is that readers can decide the question for themselves without needing Smith, Paul Finebaum, or any other television foghorn to tell them what to think.

If you want to ask whether NASCAR drivers are athletes, fine. That is a legitimate sports-bar argument. But let’s at least use the real demands of the sport instead of pretending these guys are just Uber drivers with sponsor patches.

Michael Jordan clearly took the issue seriously enough to challenge Smith on it, which makes sense given that Jordan and Hamlin launched 23XI Racing together and the team has been competing in the NASCAR Cup Series since 2021. The team’s own materials describe Jordan and Hamlin as creating a championship-minded NASCAR organization, which is not exactly the sort of project a hyper-competitive lunatic like Jordan treats as a casual hobby.

Smith had already gotten pushback from within NASCAR before the Jordan story surfaced. Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick had both challenged Smith’s take, and Harvick had even brought in-car fitness tracking data into the discussion. That is kind of important. When people who have actually done the job are pointing to real physical data and the response is basically “yeah, but my vibe says no,” maybe the problem is not with the drivers.

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And the physical case is not hard to find. The American College of Sports Medicine has noted that racing drivers routinely compete with heart rates around 160 to 180 beats per minute, can lose up to seven pounds through sweat during a race, and deal with G-forces that rival those experienced by fighter pilots and astronauts.

Michigan State’s motorsports human performance expert David Ferguson has similarly described in-car temperatures up to around 120 degrees, 3 to 4 Gs in corners, sweat losses of 3 to 5 pounds per hour, and heart rates reaching 180 beats per minute while driving. You do not have to call NASCAR drivers the same type of athletes as NBA forwards or NFL linebackers to acknowledge the obvious: sitting in a race car at 190 mph for hours while controlling heat, stress, reflexes, endurance, neck strength, hydration, and decision-making is not exactly a beer league dart tournament.

Now, if a reader still wants to say, “I don’t consider them athletes,” that is their call. That is the beauty of the debate. Maybe your definition leans more toward traditional running, jumping, tackling, and direct physical confrontation. Fine. Make the case. But make your case. Do not outsource your brain to Stephen A. Smith or Paul Finebaum, two men who have built empires on talking with tremendous confidence about things whether they deserve that confidence or not.

That is really the larger point here. Sports culture has turned too many media personalities into substitute brains for lazy fans. Stephen A. says something. Finebaum says something. Social media turns it into a tribal fight. Suddenly people start repeating opinions they did not arrive at on their own, like they are reading from cue cards written by producers. We do not need that. Especially not for something as straightforward as this.

Look at the conditions. Look at the training. Look at the data. Look at the fact that elite NASCAR drivers are managing physical fatigue, heat stress, reaction time, and precision under extreme conditions for hours at a time. Then decide for yourself whether that qualifies as athletic.

You may say yes. You may say no. But either answer should come from your own judgment, not because Stephen A. barked it into a microphone and acted like stubbornness is a substitute for evidence.

So no, Stephen A. Smith does not get to settle this. He is not the commissioner of common sense. He is not the high priest of sports truth. He is a very famous opinion machine, and sometimes the machine spits out nonsense. This looks like one of those times.

Readers can decide whether NASCAR drivers are athletes. What readers do not need is Stephen A. Smith, Paul Finebaum, or any other professional attention seeker telling them what conclusion they are allowed to reach.

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