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.
If there’s a persistent “Spider-Men pointing at each other” quality to the advertising on Sport & State, that extends to the content as well. Travis’s big idea is that in the age of AI and commodified writing, it’s better to go deep than big, that depth of audience commitment matters more than the old traffic era’s scale-focused contest for clicks. There may be some wisdom in the strategy, but that approach – drumming down and appeasing an already loyal base – seems to have become the media-obsessed Trump White House’s guiding political strategy too, a choice that risks self-sabotage as the midterms loom. Travis’s theory of media is second-term Trump’s theory of power: instead of growing the audience, the electorate, the constituency, the sole purpose of having attention is to give those listening more of the same. Discussion on Sport & State this week included a summary of Travis and Sexton’s Monday meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. Their main point was to emphasize that “President Trump says he loves the show, says we’re doing a great job” and that various Trumpworld figures greeted them during their half-hour in front of the Resolute Desk. “We saw Karoline Leavitt, our very good friend”; “We also saw Susie Wiles – she said she is cancer-free now”; “We got a little quick high-five from Stephen Miller”.
Over a chyron announcing THE VOICE OF SEAN HANNITY, the longtime Fox News host then called in to discuss: sports betting (what else?); the border collie he’s about to take delivery of at the conclusion of nine months of dog training (if this is what it takes to survive domestic cohabitation with Hannity as an animal, imagine how things must be for the humans in his house); Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul as the highest-taxing, and therefore worst, governors in America; and potential Democratic candidates for 2028 (Hannity thinks AOC will be the nominee, Travis thinks it will be Kamala Harris; they agreed to bet on the outcome, with the loser to buy the winner a steak dinner in a demonstration of red-blooded American masculinity). The segment concluded with Hannity, Sexton and Travis all saying “we had an awesome time” after five minutes of meandering conversation about nothing, and the welcome announcement that Travis would be on Hannity’s show on Fox the following day for more of the same. On the right, the Spider-Men are always pointing at each other, and they’re all the audience each other needs.
Watching Sport & State’s live programming and reading its endless churn of tiresome posts about how sports and the world suck now because of Joe Biden and woke, it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, the appeal of Travis as a right-wing media personality is. Rogan has the vague charisma of a lifelong stoner; McAfee has that dog in him, a kind of American mongrel who forever puts himself next to a gas pump or under the chassis of a hoisted car; Carlson has a habit of Mozart-laughing at his own jokes, which is at the very least engagingly bizarre; Shapiro … well, Shapiro doesn’t have much going for him, but he does talk quickly. Travis, by contrast, has neither a sense of personal style nor any real sense of humor; he’s a boring dad who drones on endlessly about mortgages and failed sports bets and his law degree. He also frequently looks exhausted on air, as does Sexton; together they form perhaps the puffiest-looking duo in American media. Who knows? Perhaps a pair of hungover-looking permadads sipping mournfully from their coffee canisters while they bemoan the latest poll numbers out of Ohio is exactly the new groove the right needs to salvage a listing presidency. But it seems unlikely.
Travis claims he’s working “20 hours a day” to produce material for Sport & State, and perhaps it really does take that long to package up clips from the previous 24 hours’ appearances on the Sean Hannity Show and Jesse Watters Primetime and Titans on Tomorrow with Ben Shapiro, brew the Crockett Coffee and get it into the spillproof containers, go on air, play the clips, then restate their substance using different words 500 times in a row. But if this is the right’s idea of a bold new intervention in sports and media, it’s hard not to feel that as a cultural force, the Magaverse is now well and truly running on fumes.
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