Why the Culture War Died in Sports

Suddenly it's normal to stick to sports again

(Terry Wyatt/Getty Images)

With Thanksgiving approaching, let’s check the status of political discussion in theoretically neutral spaces. This time of year used to bring all these think pieces on how to talk to your MAGA uncle at the table or how you should purge your conservative stepfather from family functions in the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or whatever. Now, not so much. The liberals have settled down. The conservatives have, well, I’m not completely sure of what they’re up to because I live in the Bay Area. But I know people are gathering to eat, with a primary focus on eating. Politics is on the periphery of the cultural firmament. This SNL sketch from three years ago already seems incredibly dated. And you see this across the landscape, even and especially in sports.

Someone shared a post from the Bill Simmons reddit with me and while I wouldn’t endorse every perspective in the take, I do think its conclusion gets at something. What begins as what I might regard a bog standard Sports Redditor rant against the political leanings of Clay Travis eventually arrives at a solid observation about his personal content vs. the broader sports media:

Do fans of Outkick really want CT to throw Megan Rapinoe under the bus for the 1000th time?

I know it’s old echo chamber boomers and hardcore MAGA people but damn how much of this stuff can his audience enjoy listening to?

People rip into the left-leaning websites like The Ringer and throw the word woke around on anything that’s slightly progressive but most of those websites/outlets avoid politics 95(+?)% of the time and god forbid any athlete express any type of left-leaning political opinion.

Not sure there’s a question it just baffles me in general that people actually enjoy this content on a relatively consistent basis and trying to figure it out. Rant over.

This is worth exploring. My take on this take is that yes, the Redditor is correct about mainstream sports publications avoiding politics around 95 percent of the time. He’s also correct that Travis, whose central critique of mainstream sports was that it hurt itself through over (left) politicization, is himself maxing out on (right) politicization.

I’ll cite a recent example of the latter, something I noticed when doing an article on the Charissa Thompson controversy. Thompson, an NFL sideline reporter, spoke on the PMT podcast about the early days in her career when she occasionally made up vague coach-speak quotes for broadcast when the coach didn’t show up. A hysterical, overwrought media firestorm followed, the sort that Travis is pretty well-suited to attacking. As I’ve written, long before he became Rush Limbaugh’s replacement, Travis gained traction by criticizing media outrages from a non partisan perspective.

I personally don’t think Manfred and the MLB acted well there, but this seems like such a shoehorning of conservative political grievance. What does NFL sideline reporter Charissa Thompson have to do with Rob Manfred, Joe Biden and the moving of baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game? To be fair, there are some points in his X thread, specifically about how the media will go after Thompson while abiding important lies told by powerful people. And sure, I agree with that aspect. I just didn’t necessarily see the Charissa Thompson fallout and set my watch to Joe Biden O’Clock. Whatever the argument’s merits, it is illustrative of Travis being more politically tilted than the mainstream sports media he’s critiqued as hyper-ideological.

Where I might differ with the Redditor is that I’d say this whole “95 percent non political” aspect of the mainstream is pretty new. It wasn’t even the case a couple years ago, but something has changed. The broader media is now more buttoned up on these issues. It’s because they, much like their customers, would prefer to move on from fights that previously defined the social media era.

The Crazy Times

Back in the Trump Age, when Travis represented a break with the general sports media worldview, Outkick’s targets were just as — if not more — ideological than Clay. Back then, there was all this energy behind “using your platform” and not “normalizing” whatever movement the president represented. People who’d once conceived of their institutions as politically neutral suddenly started pressuring these places to take stances on whatever issue was absorbing the focus of social media.

This sensibility eventually crescendoed in the fevered summer of 2020, when sports leagues briefly shut down, with media encouragement, because police in a small Wisconsin city shot a knife-wielding assailant who was in the process of abducting his kids from their mother. This was, looking back, a completely insane memetic reaction to a sad domestic incident, but in those days, the mainstream was very much infused with a reactive ideology. Again and again, little sparks set the world on fire, if the incident fit certain peoples’ ideological priors.

If you now find Travis to be an aggravating, constant firehose of ideological ax-grinding, know that this is what many people in sports media sounded like to a large cohort throughout the Trump years. Perhaps, if you largely agreed with the mainstream perspective, the hyperfocus on identity issues through a progressive lens seemed quite reasonable, simply table stakes for being a decent person. From my vantage, though, and the perspective of many others, a lot of the output seemed unhinged and wholly beyond the remit of a fairly unserious industry.

But the point of this article isn’t to relitigate all of that. The point of this article is to acknowledge that it stopped. Fans who wanted the media to “stick to sports” have mostly gotten their way. The vibe shift wasn’t heralded with an announcement. It just happened. Nothing major has changed in the political composition of the industry. As Bryan Curtis pointed out in 2017, the sports media is liberal. It still is. It’s just no longer vocally so.

So what shifted? Why did so many of us give up on the culture war?

Changing of the Guard

The most obvious cause of depoliticization in sports media (and elsewhere) is that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Just as important, perhaps, is that Joe Biden won it. Biden’s presidency can be debated, but I think few would contest his status as a less-than-inspiring figure, in both positive and negative directions. The United States has gone from an absolute lightning rod at the top, hotly despised by much of the educated classes, to a fading presence, whose lack of capacity makes that influential cohort merely feel uneasy.

It’s all contributed to something between a malaise and a return to normalcy. Joe is not doing well in the polls, but you expect any team that wins a championship to attend a White House ceremony. The powers that be consider Biden both legitimate and disappointing, a combination that sidelines his presence in favor of business as usual. Biden may be failing as a president, but just by existing, he’s made good on the value proposition of turning down the temperature on our politics. That part, at least, has gone well.

Culture War Fatigue

The cultural calming is not just about Biden beating Trump, though. Trump is waiting in the wings to be president again and this prospect hasn’t exactly galvanized Blue America yet. You’d think it would, given January 6th and what not, but so far, it hasn’t happened. Perhaps this has something to do with Elon Musk buying journalism’s most powerful memetic platform, but I think there’s just a general desire to move on from our recent era of social media insanity.

You even see this at Clay Travis’ Outkick the Coverage, though you might not glean that from Travis’ X feed. His website, I’d argue, is a better barometer of what’s resonating with his audience. I think a lot of people in media assume that Outkick just talks about Obama and Drag Queen Story Hour all day, at the demand of its audience of braying neanderthals. But, if you actually look at its content, a lot of it … sticks to sports?

At the time of my seeing the Reddit post on Friday, I checked out the front page of Travis’ site.

It’s pure sports, probably because readers prefer to click on sports content. Gone are the days of, “Let’s go Brandon!” as dominant Outkick meme.

Similar situation today, though culture war is small and in the bottom left. Jim Harbaugh and Michigan are what’s most prominently featured.

It’s like we’re all collectively waking up from a rager and, in our hungover state, opting for lighter fare. Post-pandemic, liberals and conservative alike just want to enjoy a game, concert or movie.

“Get Woke, Go Broke” Was Kind of True

The conservative mantra of “Get woke, go broke!” was sometimes a cope. The mainstream culture had gone fairly progressive and there wasn’t much its opponents could do beyond suggest that this would hurt certain formerly neutral institutions. Some of those institutions, especially corporations with a near-monopolistic foothold, could hardly be hurt, though.

But then “Get woke, go broke,” started to actually happen. As noted here, extravagant social justice displays at the very least correlated with major audience fall-off in sports. Disney’s stock has tanked as its tendency to ideologically reimagine cherished projects has become something of a well known joke. Social conservatives successfully boycotted Bud Light over its trans-influencer campaign.

The social media era saw corporations largely dismissing the sentiments of conservatives, absent much downside. Cons weren’t strategically located in American cultural centers and had previously been less inclined to protest at scale. Now that this changed, and cons represented a credible threat, it’s altered the corporate calculus. The backlash has chased business leaders into a return to neutrality, sports included. Sometimes you look around and see the residue of the recent era. The NBA didn’t play on November 5th because it’s Election Day, a reform advanced by the league’s 2020-created Social Justice Coalition. I see “End Racism” in NFL end zones, a goal that’s a) Very 2020, b) Impossibly ambitious and c) Now a total afterthought in popular culture.

That moving of the All-Star Game in 2021 that Clay Travis mentioned? That highly visible sports league’s adoption of a stance on legislation, according to Dem priors? It’s hard to see something like this happening right now, at this exact moment. Indeed, last week the MLB announced that Atlanta was getting its All-Star Game, in 2025. Commissioner Rob Manfred said:

I made the decision in 2021 to move the event, and I understand, believe me, that people had then and probably still have different views as to the merits of that decision. What’s most important is that the Atlanta Braves are a great organization.

Manfred didn’t really explain what changed between 2021 and today. The Braves were, presumably, a great organization then. Georgia has not altered the 2021 Election Integrity Act. But we know what changed, broadly. The vibe has shifted. For a confluence of reasons, sports are largely about sports again.