Much like Nancy Pelosi kneeling in Kente cloth, the image of NBA players wearing social justice slogans on the back of their jerseys hasn’t aged well. Like all major institutions, pro sports leagues got swept up in the fervor of 2020 and perhaps leaned a little too much into neoliberal symbolism.
Nobody believed the NFL was going to end racism or even try. But the league felt compelled to “say something” about racial unrest. So the words “End Racism” were painted on the back of each end zone. The message was hollow and patronizing to a sizable swath of sports fans. The NFL, a majority Black league mostly run by elderly white billionaires, seemed like it was lecturing its audience.
A group of right-wing pundits recognized there was a backlash among sports fans, who on average are middle-aged men, over their favorite sports leagues’ increasingly liberal cultural signals. The NBA moved its All-Star game from Charlotte over a transgender bathroom ban, and MLB shifted its All-Star game from Atlanta over a Georgia voting law. Most visibly, there was Colin Kaepernick’s protest, followed by league-wide player demonstrations in denunciation of Donald Trump.
The White House recognized the power of tapping into that venom, sending Mike Pence to an NFL game only so he could walk out when players started kneeling.
So did the conservative talkers. Arguably, nobody did it better than Clay Travis, who grew OutKick into a digital powerhouse before selling to Fox Corp. in 2021. But now, after another Trump victory, his act seems stale.
During a recent podcast interview with Semafor Media, Travis sounded stuck in 2018.
“People want basketball. Maybe then give basketball instead of Gregg Popovich lecturing me about Kamala Harris or Steve Kerr lecturing me about trade policy,” he says at one point.
Host Ben Smith responded with a verbal eye roll.
“This feels boring to me,” he says.
Is he right?
The left lost the sports culture wars
Circling back to the NFL’s efforts to “End Racism,” the league finally shelved the slogan ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. The empty words stood out like the last vestige of a bygone era, much like a 20-something posting a black image on Instagram.
While the biggest stars in sports feuded with Trump in 2017 and 2018—and one of them, Tom Brady, got pilloried for having a MAGA hat in his locker—athletes were doing the Trump dance in the aftermath of November’s election. Young men have moved rightward, and it would only make sense if athletes were part of that trend.
In a post-election interview, Kamala Harris’ campaign manager discussed their struggles to secure endorsements from the sports world.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” said Rob Flaherty.
The stonewalling of Harris extended to the sports media space. Harris did not appear on shows hosted by Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers.
Trump, meanwhile, was all over the “manosphere,” including Barstool’s “Bussin’ with the Boys” and Travis’ coverage on OutKick.
The only person who consistently talked politics on ESPN’s airwaves last year was Aaron Rodgers, who spouted right-wing conspiracy theories on Pat McAfee’s show.
Stephen A. Smith mostly keeps his political musings off of ESPN, but nobody would mistake him for a lefty. He’s made condemning “woke culture” a staple of his nascent stump speech, recently earning praise from Trump himself.
Trump’s White House once called for Jemele Hill’s firing. Now, Trump is publicly extolling ESPN’s most prominent personality.
By and large, male sports leagues are done making statements, athletes are publicly MAGA, and left-wing politics aren’t prevalent in the sports media space. (The one exception is John Skipper and Dan Le Batard’s Meadowlark Media, which employs some of the right’s favorite ESPN punching bags from yesteryear. Skipper reportedly left Meadowlark earlier this month).
The culture war is over. On the court, LeBron James and Steph Curry have given way to Rudy Gobert and Jonathan Isaac, and on ESPN, Hill and her former SportsCenter partner Michael Smith have given way to McAfee and his crew.
Stick to sports grasps at straws
Bereft of high-profile targets, sports-adjacent MAGA influencers are left to scrape for sloppy seconds, almost in a literal sense. Whenever somebody on ESPN spends even seconds endorsing a progressive cause, the writers at OutKick and Daily Wire begin foaming at their keyboards.
Last week, Kate Fagan, a former ESPN writer who used to appear on Around the Horn, ended her final appearance on the soon-to-be canceled show with a brief plea for trans inclusion. “Being on this show has been a privilege and a platform and this is my last time on it, and I want to say something worthy of that privilege and platform and that is this, ‘Trans kids deserve to play sports,” she said, speaking for a total of less than 50 seconds.
“Trans kids deserve to play sports”
Kate Fagan uses the final moments of her return to ESPN and ‘Around the Horn’ to go outside the lines once again: pic.twitter.com/j2sUbRQqOr
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 8, 2025
Judging by the reaction, you would’ve thought Fagan took over ESPN’s Bristol headquarters and started broadcasting land acknowledgments on a loop. The right-wing sports bros were outraged.
Coincidently, on the same day, Fagan spoke out in favor of trans kids playing sports, a much bigger sports media star came out on the opposite side of the debate. Appearing on OutKick’s Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich, Charles Barkley ripped the idea of trans athletes playing women’s sports.
“Men should not play sports against women. I’m not going to get into all the bullsh*t that’s going on out here in the world today,” he said.
A long-time LGBTQ+ ally, Barkley’s strong words represent the state of the discourse. They carry far more weight and reach far more people than Fagan’s.
Yet to Travis, Fagan’s short soliloquy is why “woke ESPN is failing.” She’s being used as a real-life straw man.
“Men should not play sports against women…If anybody thinks that, I think they’re stupid.”
NBA Hall of Famer, Charles Barkley, made his stance on transgender athletes crystal clear.
Full interview dropping soon.@dandakich pic.twitter.com/dqIpZLjCRA
— OutKick (@Outkick) May 8, 2025
When Fagan isn’t in the crosshairs, it’s a random Canadian women’s basketball team with a trans player or trans participants in the U.K. pool championships. Right-wing sports guys and Riley Gaines fixate on any story, no matter how small, to make it seem like there’s some sort of trans sports takeover.
“When I look at the fight over whether there’s a trans player in U.K. women’s pool, I’m thinking, ‘These guys have run out of stuff to talk about,'” Smith says to Travis.
Purposefully obtuse about the media landscape
Perhaps the hallmark argument of the “stick to sports” crowd centers around the NBA and its declining TV ratings. They will declare the NBA has lost 75% of its audience since Michael Jordan as if no other entity has seen its ratings fall over the last 30 years.
Look at the numbers for primetime network TV. The Seinfeld finale in 1998 drew a whopping 76.3 million viewers. Network sitcoms draw a slim fraction of those numbers today, and it’s not because they’re “too woke.” It’s because people don’t watch sitcoms on NBC anymore.
In fact, the numbers show that most people don’t watch anything on TV outside of NFL games and select live events. Eighty of the 100 most-watched shows last year were NFL contests.
On the Semafor podcast, Travis cites the popularity of Jordan’s Last Dance documentary as if that’s some sort of indictment on the NBA’s current product. “More people watched the Jordan-era documentary, The Last Dance, than watched the NBA Finals,” he says.
The Last Dance was indeed a major hit, scoring 23.8 million global streams on Netflix at the height of the COVIDlockdowns. That number dwarfs the viewership total for all but six NBA Finals games since 1998.
But again, it’s not like The Last Dance‘s dominance over the NBA Finals is peculiar. The most popular shows on Netflix draw 6-8 times the audience as the most popular shows on linear TV.
In the second half of 2024, 84 million people watched Squid Games, the No. 1 show on Netflix. The most-viewed show on TV last year that wasn’t sports, political debate, or a live event was an episode of CBS’ Preternatural. Episode 5 of Season 2 drew 11.8 million viewers on Nov. 10. (More than 70 million people saw Squid Games.)
Anecdote-obsessed, Travis attempts to back up his NBA ratings argument with tidbits about March Madness viewership surging or Caitlin Clark boosting women’s basketball to unforeseen heights. But those are anomalies, a concept Travis should know well.
Because that’s how he dismisses the NBA’s current playoff ratings success.
Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo EVISCERATE NBA ratings doomers Clay Travis and Bobby Burack pic.twitter.com/eyQBbYuURL
— The r/BillSimmons Podcast (@rBillSimmonsPod) April 28, 2025
There’s money in beating the dead horse
When Travis gets asked directly about OutKick’s fixation on obscure trans athletes or NBA ratings narratives, he says their fans love it. Indeed, the numbers seem strong. OutKick attracted 8.4 million visitors in April and boasts 1.73 million subscribers on YouTube.
Given the prevalence of right-wing sports rage bait, there’s still seemingly an audience for it. One TikToker recently highlighted how right-wing sports channels appear to talk about everything except sports. “As we go through this, let’s keep in mind the NBA playoffs are in full effect. The NHL playoffs are in full effect. We just had a huge upset in the UFC, and the baseball season is going on,” he says as he peeks at the YouTube channels for OutKick, Jason Whitlock, and the Daily Wire’s Crain & Company.
He finds nothing but criticism of LeBron, complaints about ESPN, tawdry gossip about Bill Belichick, and, on the latter’s page… college football (in late April, months away from the start of the season).
@drivenprogressive1
The NBA playoffs are going on but conservatives sports shows would rather call Mina Kimes DEI #politics #espn #sportsmedia #news #sportstiktok
♬ original sound – Driven progressive
But the mere monetization of content doesn’t mean the ideas are fresh or interesting. It’s worth noting that Travis took over Rush Limbaugh’s time slot right around the time he sold OutKick to News Corp. That’s where lambasting Mina Kimes for praising Jackie Robinson may always play well. In talk radio, daily shows are carried by the constant drumbeat of repetitive grievances.
The “stick to sports” crowd may have run out of things to say, but there will always be people who want to hear them talk, especially on the AM dial.