Clay Travis offers $2m to Kaepernick as he pushes new Sport & State venture
Clay Travis offered $2m to Colin Kaepernick last week to appear on the daily talkshow he hosts with former CIA analyst Buck Sexton, an approach framed as $2m to charity in exchange for an interview and timed to promote his new media venture Sport & State, which launched in August.
Sport & State is Travis’s attempt to rebuild a media profile he previously grew through Outkick, which he sold to Fox Sports for a rumored $100m, and to reclaim audience share lost to hosts such as Pat McAfee and Joe Rogan; there has been no response from Kaepernick to the offer and the programmes feature no representatives of the left or progressive politics. The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show airs from noon to 3pm ET, followed by the Clay Travis Show from 3-4pm, and the on-air content and advertising are tightly integrated with Travis’s other business interests.
Daily programming on Sport & State, according to sustained listening, cycles around a narrow set of themes: college football gambling picks; Trumpworld figures who are friendly with Travis and Sexton; discussions asserting the virtues of those figures in power; frequent attacks on trans women in sport; urban crime stories; critiques of women; personal details about family life; Travis’s legal credentials; his rejection by Stanford and subsequent Vanderbilt alumni narrative; and routine mentions of appearances on Fox News. The article’s tally suggests trans women in professional sport account for roughly “20% to 50%” of discussion on shows Travis hosts, even as it states the number of actual trans women competing in professional American sports is “exactly zero” and that there are “probably fewer than 10 trans athletes in total in college sports.”
Commercially, Sport & State is built around gambling partnerships and a cluster of Travis-owned or -affiliated businesses. Hard Rock Bet is the official gambling partner and holds equity in Sport & State, and on-air promotions include Hard Rock Bet offers such as “Bet $5, get $100 in bonus bets.” Other plugs name Perfect 10 Mortgage, Crockett Coffee, XX-XY Athletics and Clay Travis Law, all of which the reporting says Travis either owns outright or has a stake in. The venture’s stated mission emphasises onshoring advertising to reduce dependence on subscriptions and external advertisers, with gambling presented as the primary revenue driver.
The financial rationale draws on Outkick’s previous affiliate work: after sports betting was legalised in 2018, Outkick became an affiliate of FanDuel, earning $350 for every new gambling account it helped create and reportedly netting $2m in affiliate betting revenue on Super Bowl Sunday in 2021. Sport & State is described as structured to pursue similar affiliate returns through its Hard Rock Bet relationship, while Travis also expects his other businesses to benefit from audience time spent on sports commentary.
Content examples cited in the reporting include a recent Monday meeting between Travis, Sexton and former President Trump in the Oval Office, where they relayed that “President Trump says he loves the show, says we’re doing a great job” and recounted encounters during the visit: “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”. A later segment carried a chyron reading THE VOICE OF SEAN HANNITY and featured Hannity calling in to discuss sports betting, a border collie he is due to take delivery of, Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul as the highest-taxing governors, and potential Democratic candidates for 2028; on that topic Hannity said he thinks AOC will be the nominee and Travis said he thinks it will be Kamala Harris, with the two agreeing to bet and the loser to buy the winner a steak dinner.
The reporting contrasts Travis’s on-air manner with other right-leaning hosts, noting perceived differences in charisma and style among Joe Rogan, Pat McAfee, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, and describing Travis as a “boring dad who drones on endlessly about mortgages and failed sports bets and his law degree.” It also records that both Travis and Sexton frequently appear tired on air and refers to them together as “perhaps the puffiest-looking duo in American media.” Travis is quoted as saying he is working “20 hours a day” to produce material for Sport & State.
The programmes’ commercial and editorial approach is likely to continue in the near term: the reporting notes Sport & State’s setup to monetise through its Hard Rock Bet partnership and other affiliated businesses, and after a segment in which Hannity, Sexton and Travis concluded by saying “we had an awesome time” the show announced that Travis would be on Hannity’s Fox programme the following day.