Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., railed against the Minnesota Vikings’ decision to feature male cheerleaders on its 2025 squad roster, warning the NFL that it’s setting itself up for a “huge problem.”
Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn have been the talk of the league since the preseason began, drawing backlash on social media from irate NFL fans.
“I would like to ask the ownership of the NFL and the commissioner, what the hell are you doing?” Tuberville said Tuesday on OutKick’s “Hot Mic” podcast. “You’ve got the No. 1 sport on planet Earth in terms of people watching it. Your business is growing, it’s getting better and better. There’s some ways you’ve tried to attack it over the last 10-15 years, but you’ve been able to withstand that.
“But if you’re going to be woke and you’re gonna try to take the men out of men’s sports, which is what you’re doing — they’re trying to take gender and say, ‘OK, we’re going to make it more about gender than we are about masculinity’ — then, you’re going to have a huge problem,” he said. “It’s coming.”
The Alabama senator cautioned the league that fans could potentially stop purchasing tickets to games if the male cheerleader trend continues.
“You can see Minnesota doing it,” Tuberville said. “They’re one of the blue states. We’ve lost them. They’re more about socialism and all the things that go on with that and it’s about 150 genders. At the end of the day, I hope to God it doesn’t come south to Atlanta or to Texas or to Dallas or to some of our NFL teams because you’ll lose it.
“People will actually quit buying tickets because this is the narrative they’re trying to push,” he said. “This is not just about a couple of people being men cheerleaders. It is about pushing a narrative that you want to put gender into sports and let everyone know we’re trying to show, ‘Hey, we’re going to take the masculinity out of it a little bit.’ And that’s not going to happen in the South.”
After the Vikings announced that Shiek and Conn made the 35-person cheer roster earlier this month, fans quickly sounded off in the Instagram post’s comments section about the new hires.
“I just lost all of my respect for the Vikings,” Colton Arrand wrote.
“Have the Minnesota Vikings lost their f-ing minds?!” Mike Corso said on X. “These are the two new cheerleaders. They took two jobs from women and put these two feminine men in their place. Somebody save us.”
“I would cancel my tickets. Cheerleading is simply a woman sport. Men don’t need to be in everything. In 10 years men will be the only ones dancing in the field,” NFL_Reportz wrote, including a vomiting emoji.
The Vikings responded to the ensuing fan revolt with a statement of support for Shiek and Conn.
“Male cheerleaders have been part of previous Vikings teams and have long been associated with collegiate and professional cheerleading,” the team told NBC News last week. “We support all our cheerleaders and are proud of the role they play as ambassadors of the organization.”
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