For the better part of two decades, winning the Super Bowl came with a certain celebratory cadence. Winning players smoked cigars and sprayed beer in the locker room. They popped bottles of champagne while parading through their cities. And then, eventually, they put on suits and visited the president at the White House.
The 2016 election of President Donald Trump, however, complicated that last ceremonial step. And now that he is back in office, the recently-crowned Philadelphia Eagles will be the first NFL team to face the increasingly thorny prospect of a visit to the White House.
“I’d be honored to go, regardless of who the president is, but we’ll see,’ Eagles offensive lineman Lane Johnson said Sunday night, according to Sportico. ‘It’s ultimately a team decision. I’ll do what’s best for the team.’
The tradition of visiting the White House was once seen as almost automatic for championship teams in major professional sports leagues, particularly the NFL. Between 2001 and 2016, all but one Super Bowl-winning team made the trip, shaking hands and taking photos with presidents of both parties.
During Trump’s first term, however, only one of the four Super Bowl-winning teams made a White House visit − at least in part because of the president’s verbal attacks on the league, and players who kneeled during the national anthem to protest racial inequality. In 2018, he stunningly disinvited the Eagles on the eve of their scheduled trip, with then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders publicly ripping the organization as trying to pull ‘a political stunt.’ (NFL Network reported that the Eagles had planned to send a contingent of fewer than 10 players to the ceremony. The White House instead hosted a brief, awkward event that it described as a celebration of America.)
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Eagles spokespeople did not immediately reply to a message from USA TODAY Sports on Monday morning about whether the team has been invited to visit the White House after its most recent Super Bowl win, or whether it would attend if invited. And owner Jeffrey Lurie demurred when asked about a hypothetical visit last week by Front Office Sports.
Such decisions are commonly made weeks, and sometimes months, after a Super Bowl victory. But since Trump was on hand at the SuperDome to see the Eagles demolish the Kansas City Chiefs, the question is not going away. And regardless of where the organization lands, experts said it’s clear that the stakes of a White House visit have changed.
“I just think the politics of today are so polarized that whatever you do, you’re going to be perceived to be supporting a political platform or a position,’ historian Frank Guridy said.
Guridy, the author of ‘The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play,’ recalled a 1985 championship visit in which a notably progressive athlete, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, met with a conservative president, Ronald Reagan. (‘I’m not a Republican, but I am one of his constituents,’ the Los Angeles Lakers legend said when presenting Reagan with a ceremonial jersey.)
Sports becomes a cultural wedge
For so long, a championship team visiting the White House was seen as the default stance. And the only politicization of the ceremony came when a handful of athletes decided not to go, such as NFL player Matt Birk, who cited President Barack Obama’s support for Planned Parenthood as his reason for boycotting a 2013 trip.
‘People were invested in a sense of civility and respect in political culture, so even if you don’t agree with Ronald Reagan, you’ll show up with your team,’ Guridy said. ‘That’s not the climate we’re in now.’
During Trump’s first term in office, championship teams’ visits to the White House were more sporadic and divided along lines of sport and gender. In a reversal of recent precedent, several championship teams in women’s sports did not receive invitations. And NBA teams, whose players are predominantly Black, either were not invited or declined to attend.
The NHL’s Florida Panthers are the only team to have visited the White House in the weeks since Trump’s return. At a ceremony last week, the president received a framed ‘Trump 45-47’ jersey and repeatedly praised Panthers owner Vinnie Viola, who was Trump’s pick to be secretary of the Army for a brief period in 2016.
While sports and politics have always been intertwined, Guridy explained, a star athlete’s visit to the White House might now be seen as a tacit endorsement of the president’s policies in a way that it previously wasn’t.
Tom Knecht, a political science professor at Westmont College, thinks this could be at least partly a reflection of the way Trump has approached sports while in office.
‘Most presidents use sports as kind of a way to unify the nation − a way to talk about things that are certainly less divisive than, say, border policy or tariffs,’ Knecht said. ‘And Trump is one of the few presidents that actually uses sports to kind of press a political advantage.’
In research published on his blog, Knecht analyzed and categorized the different ways that U.S. presidents since Teddy Roosevelt have talked about sports while in office. He found that while presidents most commonly use sports to ingratiate themselves with the American people or make sweeping points about American ideals, Trump has been more willing to use them as a cultural wedge or an avenue to a policy objective.
Last week, for example, Trump signed an executive order that attempts to ban the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports as part of a broader attack on LGBTQ rights and initiatives supporting diversity, equity and inclusion.
Knecht believes that Trump’s politicization of sports means that teams and athletes will continue to face scrutiny around how they interact with him, White House visits included.
‘It’s a double-edged sword,’ Knecht said. ‘How many times do you get to go visit the White House, and represent your team? But also you have your own political values to think of.’
Political climate may permanently alter team visits
When asked about the long-term future of the traditional White House visit for championship teams, however, Knecht said he views the next four years as a time of temporary uncertainty.
Guridy, meanwhile, is not so sure. He sees Trump’s second term as the byproduct of an increasingly win-at-all-costs political climate that will persist for decades to come − and perhaps alter or upend the ceremonial visits altogether.
‘Maybe the White House visit continues, but it either peters out because it becomes too politically problematic for the president. Or it’ll be a situation where certain leagues align themselves with the administration and others won’t,’ Guridy said.
‘I don’t think it’s a blip. I really don’t. I hope it is. But I don’t think it is.’
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @tomschad.bsky.social.