When Maga media blowhard Clay Travis offered $2m to Colin Kaepernick last week to appear on the daily talkshow he hosts with former CIA analyst Buck Sexton, it represented the culmination of a years-long obsession on the right with the onetime NFL star. In Travis’s telling of history, Kaepernick taking a knee during the 2016 NFL season was the event that catalyzed professional sports into the era of “woke” excess from which, he claims, it has been struggling to recover ever since. But more than simply confirming the right’s longstanding villainization of Kaepernick, Travis’s offer was also a smarmy bid for publicity for his new media venture, Sport & State.
Sport & State, which launched in August, is Travis’s bid to get back to his roots as a media mogul who sold the wildly popular Outkick to Fox Sports for a rumored $100m, and reclaim some of the cultural territory lost to fellow sports bros and Magagitators like Pat McAfee, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But if there’s one thing Sport & State won’t be doing, it’s engaging with anyone beyond the Magaverse. There has been no response from Kaepernick since Travis made his “offer” of $2m to charity in exchange for an interview, which suggests he understands that it was extended more in a spirit of trolling buffoonery than sincerity.
No one associated with the left or progressive politics ever appears on Travis’s shows, for the simple reason that they are designed purely for the right to talk to itself. (Some would say the same could be said of the left, although the disregard for dissenting perspectives in the Magasphere seems way more extreme.) More than it heralds a renewal of Travis’s career or an injection of fresh energy into the Trumpist mediasphere, Sport & State is a case study in the stagnation that has taken hold on the right as Donald Trump stares down the barrel of defeat in November’s midterm elections. Having spent the better part of the past two months listening to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show (which runs from noon to 3pm ET every weekday) and the Clay Travis Show (3-4pm), I can say with confidence that there are, in essence, only 11 topics a given day’s programming on Sport & State will cover: college football gambling picks; Trumpworld figures who are friends with Travis and Sexton; the wonderful job that these figures are doing in power (sometimes mixed with the preceding theme: “Our friend Kash, who is truly our friend, Clay and I are both buddies with him, he’s a good man,” Sexton affirmed on a recent episode); the low levels of testosterone apparently common among white males who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 (“white dudes for Kamala” is perhaps the gravest slur on the Clay Travis Show); trans women in professional sport (I haven’t calculated this precisely but at a guess I’d say this accounts for 20% to 50% of the discussion on any show that Travis hosts, even as the number of actual trans women competing in professional American sports remains exactly zero and there are probably fewer than 10 trans athletes in total in college sports); crime in America’s cities (in recent weeks the fixation has been Lindsay Clancy, but it’s liable to switch at any moment to Iryna Zarutska, Luigi Mangione, Charlie Kirk, Iryna Zarutska, or whatever murder happens to have taken place on that particular day in New York City); the problem with women (in summary: they are women); the fact that Travis and Sexton are both family men with wives and children; the fact that Travis has a law degree from Vanderbilt University; the fact that Travis studied law at Vanderbilt after he was rejected by Stanford (“I wanted to go to Stanford Law School, they didn’t want me, I went to Vanderbilt instead – I’ve now made a $10m donation to Vanderbilt Law School”); and the fact that Travis appeared on Fox News last night and will appear on Fox News again later today. Sprinkled throughout all of this are plugs for Hard Rock Bet (“Bet $5, get $100 in bonus bets”), which is the official gambling partner of Sport & State and holds equity in Travis’s upstart media concern, and companies such as Perfect 10 Mortgage, Crockett Coffee, XX-XY Athletics and Clay Travis Law, all of which – it should come as no surprise – Travis either outright owns or holds a stake in.
The recursiveness and self-referentiality of the advertising and content on Sport & State are all part of the site’s commercial strategy, according to Travis’s lengthy mission statement. The onshoring of all the advertising will, Travis claims, insulate his new venture from the vagaries of media’s traditional dependence on subscriptions and external advertisers. Gambling is the key revenue driver: Outkick became an affiliate of FanDuel after sports betting was legalized in 2018 and eventually made $350 for every new gambling account it helped set up, netting $2m in affiliate betting revenue on Super Bowl Sunday in 2021 alone, and Sport & State is set up to reap similar rewards through its partnership with Hard Rock Bet.
But Travis’s expectation is that his home loan business, say, will also prosper as viewers stay online to hear his views on Ole Miss v LSU, Lane Kiffin or the apparent attempted hijacking of the Israel-bound passenger jet and what it means for the future of DEI in America. Inadvertently, perhaps, Travis’s sidequest companies offer a sense of what Sport & State’s ideal audience member looks like: a patriotic American male with a habit of deploying the phrase “perfect 10” unironically whose life revolves around mortgages, coffee, litigation, gambling and moaning about trans women. On the Crockett Coffee blog, recent posts include “American Coffee Origins and Brewing Techniques”, “Discovering American Coffee’s Unique Flavors”, and “The Americano: A Complete History” (do I detect a theme here?); Travis sips throughout the day on Sport & State from a black spillproof coffee container, emphasizing his own commitment to the cause of caffeine and country.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
