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In Travis\u2019s telling of history, Kaepernick taking a knee during the 2016 NFL season was the event that catalyzed professional sports into the era of \u201cwoke\u201d excess from which, he claims, it has been struggling to recover ever since.But more than simply confirming the right\u2019s longstanding villainization of Kaepernick, Travis\u2019s offer was also a smarmy bid for publicity for his new media venture, Sport & State. Sport & State, which launched in August, is Travis\u2019s 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\u2019s one thing Sport & State won\u2019t be doing, it\u2019s engaging with anyone beyond the Magaverse. There has been no response from Kaepernick since Travis made his \u201coffer\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cOur friend Kash, who is truly our friend, Clay and I are both buddies with him, he\u2019s a good man,\u201d Sexton affirmed on a recent episode); the low levels of testosterone apparently common among white males who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 (\u201cwhite dudes for Kamala\u201d is perhaps the gravest slur on the Clay Travis Show); trans women in professional sport (I haven\u2019t calculated this precisely but at a guess I\u2019d 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\u2019s cities (in recent weeks the fixation has been Lindsay Clancy, but it\u2019s 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 (\u201cI wanted to go to Stanford Law School, they didn\u2019t want me, I went to Vanderbilt instead \u2013 I\u2019ve now made a $10m donation to Vanderbilt Law School\u201d); 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 (\u201cBet $5, get $100 in bonus bets\u201d), which is the official gambling partner of Sport & State and holds equity in Travis\u2019s upstart media concern, and companies such as Perfect 10 Mortgage, Crockett Coffee, XX-XY Athletics and Clay Travis Law, all of which \u2013 it should come as no surprise \u2013 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\u2019s commercial strategy, according to Travis\u2019s lengthy mission statement. The onshoring of all the advertising will, Travis claims, insulate his new venture from the vagaries of media\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s sidequest companies offer a sense of what Sport & State\u2019s ideal audience member looks like: a patriotic American male with a habit of deploying the phrase \u201cperfect 10\u201d unironically whose life revolves around mortgages, coffee, litigation, gambling and moaning about trans women. On the Crockett Coffee blog, recent posts include \u201cAmerican Coffee Origins and Brewing Techniques\u201d, \u201cDiscovering American Coffee\u2019s Unique Flavors\u201d, and \u201cThe Americano: A Complete History\u201d (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\u2019s a persistent \u201cSpider-Men pointing at each other\u201d quality to the advertising on Sport & State, that extends to the content as well. Travis\u2019s big idea is that in the age of AI and commodified writing, it\u2019s better to go deep than big, that depth of audience commitment matters more than the old traffic era\u2019s scale-focused contest for clicks. There may be some wisdom in the strategy, but that approach \u2013 drumming down and appeasing an already loyal base \u2013 seems to have become the media-obsessed Trump White House\u2019s guiding political strategy too, a choice that risks self-sabotage as the midterms loom. Travis\u2019s theory of media is second-term Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s Monday meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. Their main point was to emphasize that \u201cPresident Trump says he loves the show, says we\u2019re doing a great job\u201d and that various Trumpworld figures greeted them during their half-hour in front of the Resolute Desk. \u201cWe saw Karoline Leavitt, our very good friend\u201d; \u201cWe also saw Susie Wiles \u2013 she said she is cancer-free now\u201d; \u201cWe got a little quick high-five from Stephen Miller\u201d.Many on the right saw Colin Kaepernick\u2019s decision to kneel during the anthem as a pivot point in US sports and culture. Photograph: Marcio Jos\u00e9 S\u00e1nchez/APOver 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\u2019s 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 \u201cwe had an awesome time\u201d after five minutes of meandering conversation about nothing, and the welcome announcement that Travis would be on Hannity\u2019s 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\u2019re all the audience each other needs.Watching Sport & State\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2026 well, Shapiro doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s working \u201c20 hours a day\u201d to produce material for Sport & State, and perhaps it really does take that long to package up clips from the previous 24 hours\u2019 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\u2019s idea of a bold new intervention in sports and media, it\u2019s hard not to feel that as a cultural force, the Magaverse is now well and truly running on fumes." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790976624.277456", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-03T01:37:37.407114+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-10-03T01:37:37.399201+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Clay Travis: inside the Maga permadad\u2019s world of sports bros, trans panic and mortgages | US sports media | The Guardian", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790976624.277456", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-03T01:37:37.351052+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--reject=js,mjs,woff,woff2,ttf,otf,eot,mp4,m4v,mov,webm,ogv,mkv,avi,flv", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "--timestamping", "https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-10-03T01:37:37.341564+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790976624.277456", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-03T01:37:34.690957+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Clay Travis: inside the Maga permadad\u2019s world of sports bros, trans panic and mortgages | US sports media | The Guardian", "warc": null, "wget": "www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1790976624.277456", "newest_archive_date": "2026-10-03T01:37:39.933065+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-10-03T01:37:33.485219+00:00", "path": "/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "e81d25fa-f5a1-4542-bf57-f68e3c09964e", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1790976624-import.txt" ], "tags": ",war-wiki,pool,drudge", "tags_str": "war-wiki,pool,drudge", "timestamp": "1790976624.277456", "title": "Clay Travis: inside the Maga permadad\u2019s world of sports bros, trans panic and mortgages | US sports media | The Guardian", "updated": "2026-10-03T01:37:33.484865+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-10-03 01:37", "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/02/clay-travis-sport-and-state" }