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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope that you'll rate, review, and subscribe to this one. Share it with a friend if you find it of interest.
Today I have a conversation with one of the substackers who I follow very closely. I subscribe, I pay to subscribe to his substack, which tells you how much I'm interested in what he has to say. Ethan Strauss is perhaps the greatest sports substacker out there. He is someone who
who writes about both the business of sports and the different cultural implications, as well as covering it from a lot of different perspectives. He's a former NBA beat writer, something that has really gone out of style. We'll talk about that a little bit. But he's also someone who's the author of a couple of pieces recently about the effect that the new name, image, and licensing rules have had
on college sports and particularly what they've done when it comes to impacting the games from a gender divide perspective. Essentially, if we get into this, what's going on is something I think that's absolutely predictable. The best athletes in terms of NIL performance on the male side
tend to be people who are at the top of their game. They tend to be people who are, you know, excellent, uh, college football athletes and the like. Uh, but when it comes to the female side of the perspective, uh, they actually are able to essentially leverage, uh,
their looks and their aesthetic appeal in order to gain more attention. He's called it the cornicoving of sports. And I think that that's an apt title. There's also other titles that we'll get into as well in terms of his piece for the free press, talking about the impact that this has had on a couple of athletes in particular, the Cavender twins.
But then we also talk about a number of other areas where there has been really a sea change in the landscape of sports media, thanks to the prevalence of a new approach driven in part by betting interests, gambling interests and the like over the traditional approach to covering sports in media.
We'll have more of our conversation with Ethan Strauss coming up next. But I encourage you to check out his sub stack. It's House of Strauss. And you can also subscribe there and get his podcasts as well. He's a prolific writer and podcaster. And I strongly recommend that you check him out. Ethan Strauss coming up next.
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Ethan Strauss, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thanks for having me. So I have to confess, I have different podcasts and different sub stacks that I try to keep up with. And the simple fact is that your level of output in terms of content that you create
is uh one of the few areas where i actually fall behind and and so i don't always i'm not always able to keep up with the amount that you're producing um but i was very fascinated when you popped up uh in uh in a different uh feed where i do kind of i'm able to keep up with what they do uh from the free press and barry weiss's publication following on what i thought of as
a really seminal piece from you a couple of months back on the, the corner coving of, of college sports and everything that came out of that with this profile of the calendar twins. And then you wrote an additional essay, which I actually found even more interesting about kind of the business side of, of that and what it also meant as it related to sports media and to this transition from beat
beat reporting, you know, actually paying attention to what's going on, you know, in the field of play or in the arena versus kind of TikTok personalities tied to various organizations. And then I saw you go viral in a way that I never thought I would expect you to do. So I wanted to talk to you about all of that because I feel like it's a very interesting element of both kind of an example of
the challenge of writing about these things, of detailing the phenomenon, and also sort of the unique differences that happen when you are trying to essentially cover athletes who are functioning instead as kind of celebrity personalities. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you just first off is,
Did you ever expect when you were asked to go and profile the Cavender twins to pay attention to what they were doing that it would be the thing that would end up getting you into USA Today and all these other places in the way that you did? No, no.
I'm often naive about it. I've had two big controversies, viral controversies I've been a part of. The first was when I was a reporter covering the Golden State Warriors in 2019, and I said that Kevin Durant was probably going to leave the Warriors, and he definitely took umbrage to that, and lo and behold, he left the Warriors. I thought that was pretty obvious, too. He wasn't saying anything good about
about being on the Warriors in constant press conferences, and there's just enough behind the scenes. And then in this instance, I guess it was controversial to say that looks are a part of why women's athletes are getting more NIL money, even though
Everybody knows that. That's what caused the controversy here. I wrote the article for the Free Press. I don't think it was that controversial when I wrote it. And the title was a little bit provocative. It was something like the NCAA has a hot girl problem and.
the Cavender twins released a statement. They didn't like, I think sexist trope might've been used as a, as a phrase and the idea that women can only profit off their looks and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And I, I'm not sure if they were just responding to the title. There wasn't much about the substance that, that was really objected to, but it just seemed the,
I don't know, kind of a fascinating bit of a kayfabe just in that everybody kind of knows what's going on. But when somebody actually says it, all of a sudden it loses its power. Maybe that's the mentality because otherwise I'm really struggling. Yeah, but they I mean, they did.
I'm going to say – I'm going to be more critical of them. I don't know if you feel comfortable with that, but I was frankly – I don't want to get into a big argument with 22-year-old TikTok zoomers. I understand. That's my – I was deeply offended by the way that they talked about you. I was offended because it seemed like they were trying to make it into –
a sort of stalker-ish thing. Like, we invited this gentleman into our home, never expecting that he would write about the fact that we are young, attractive women, and that that is something that has actually enabled our careers and helped us make more money. And it's like, what the hell do you think? I mean, come on. How do you think this is ridiculous? You know how this works. Ben, did you notice that there...
You might have noticed the glossy photo. That was the photo shoot. This was a very preordained kind of situation. It wasn't me. They don't dress like that just normally? I mean, come on. This is ridiculous. It's like saying – I mean, I'm sorry. On a certain level, it's basically saying you – it's as if you had come into –
Write a profile of the up-and-coming hot Hollywood actress or the – I don't know, Britney Spears in the early 2000s or something like that and never made – and you didn't think that that would be part of the piece? Like what is wrong with you? This is going to be something that you comment on. And the other thing is –
commenting on that actually doesn't denigrate their athletic prowess in the sense that you, you actually make a distinction between, you know, one of them was a pretty good player. The other one really was not as good of a player, but they had this twin factor that sort of, you know, benefits them. But here's the other thing. There's nothing wrong with that. They're hustling. They're like, you're, you're trying to make the most of your opportunity and,
And, you know, I mean, let's flip the genders for a minute. If there was some, you know, athlete who was a really subpar quarterback or wide receiver, but he was really hot and he was making a lot of money in the NIL, you would be covering that.
Like that, like this is not like a sexist or gender specific thing. It's like, you know, so-and-so has dropped, you know, 40 passes, you know, in the last six games. And yet he's making the most NIL money because he knows how to pose for Instagram. You know, that's like, that's the way that this works.
It's just reality. But also the interesting part was that in their statement – and I don't want to relitigate this and have a big argument with them over it because, frankly, it is what it is. But they said that I asked only one question about their physical looks. That was – they put that in scare quotes.
I actually did not ask a single question about that. I recorded the entire interview. I've got the whole transcript, everything else. I wouldn't want to be in the position that I ended up in. That was frankly it. I don't want to be in that situation. I don't want to be Homer Simpson from the Gummy DeMilo episode. That was such a great poll, but then it made me remember that that episode also marks our age.
Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. Although it's timeless. It's a classic is what I would – it's a classic is what I would say. Yeah, I just – so, yeah, I didn't actually ask about that, but we did quote other people talking about it because it is a little bit controversial. And here's the thing. For those who don't know, to give some quick exposition –
In college sports, you did not get paid to do them. You were not allowed to be paid to do them for decades, decades, decades, decades. And then the Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that, hey, this cannot continue. This violates the antitrust rules that we have. And so that opened up something called NIL, name, image, likeness. So now the athletes of these universities can get paid by boosters, but they can also profit off of their boosters.
their brand. There was some hand-wringing going into it that, oh my God, the men are going to get paid so much more than the women because there's more demand to watch men's sports than women's sports. The women have been surprisingly competitive, but...
But there's this new wrinkle that I think makes administrators and the NCAA bureaucracy a little uncomfortable, which is that unlike with the men, it's not entirely correlated to who's the best at the sport. You've got the Cavender twins who made more money than anybody has ever made in the history of the planet playing women's basketball. One pretty good starter, but not WNBA level. The other coming off the bench,
That clearly has more to do with branding image and being big on TikTok and aesthetics are part of that. And so what you're seeing is a massive disruption to the way things were and these very difficult to reconcile forces because in the past, say what you will, the NCAA –
It was high on prestige and low, obviously, on payment because you weren't allowed to be paid. Now it's getting a little funny. It's the Kornikovian, as I said. So I want to unpack that quite a bit because from my perspective, this is a conversation that I remember having.
you know decades ago when we were still you know playing ncaa football games that had eric crouch in it you know and that kind of thing where it's like you know okay here's a guy who's never going to go to the nfl or if he does he's going to be some you know sort of failed white wide receiver he's gonna you know flame out at the rams or whatever like these are people whose skill sets are completely confined to the college game uh shouldn't they have the ability to profit from that
to go out and do ads for the local Ford dealership or something like that because they have a limited window.
in which they're going to be able to profit from it. And because, you know, we understand that the universities are making huge amounts of money just selling jerseys with their number on it. And so that was always kind of the centerpiece of the argument. What it left out, which we've since discovered, is that there's this whole influencer side of it that doesn't really require you to actually be good at the sport. It requires you to have a different skill set.
And this is the thing that was so interesting about your other piece that you wrote for your own Substack, which again, I found to be even more interesting, which detailed that basically this is a real skill set. It requires you to do actual work in order to influence, in order to connect with your audience. And as much as we, you know, elder millennials can look down on the TikTok generation as being...
and not caring as much about the work of writing or something like that. They actually are doing work in terms of the way that they're producing these things as if they are admin, basically, coming up with new hooks, new language, the right music to put behind a certain thing in ways that are foreign to us but are still a skill set. Yeah.
It's all so stupid and it requires so much savvy and so much skill. It's a paradox. I mentioned the Cavenders of Parnassus
partnered with a gambling slash content company run by Jake Paul, the influencer slash boxer out of Puerto Rico, which is his tax shelter. And already some of your listeners are going, what are they even talking about? What is this even about? But Jake Paul is a master of getting that sort of
He has 17 million followers on TikTok, and he is running that company. And the first thing they had the Cavenders do when I was there, when this man showed up, stalking. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, okay. So – Save him for a second, but continue. Oh, yeah. We're going to save the Derek situation, what they're thinking. Yeah, yeah. Okay, we'll get into Derek. But I'm going to make this point. The interesting thing to me about the Zoomers and Younger –
It's how non-institutional they are. And I don't know how much of that is a function of technology and how much of that is a function of the boomers creating a bottleneck and then just were not able to ascend and replenish in the traditional structures like we were able to. Jake Paul is interesting to me because –
He's got 17 million followers. He is rich enough to where he's hiding his money and living in Puerto Rico off of being an entertainer. And he is so non-institutional. He was telling the Cavenders that you're bigger than the conglomerate, as crazy as that sounds. And it might be so. And there are other implications. It's interesting talking to you on a more conservative outlet.
because it occurred to me, I didn't put this in the article, that Jake Paul's a huge Trump head, just a huge Trump supporter. And how does that hurt his career? Not at all. Not at all. It doesn't do anything to him. If he was a big time Hollywood actor, if he was in the academic world, if he was doing TV or if he was a sports broadcaster, um,
I think this would all hurt him or he wouldn't be able to really do whatever he wanted instead because he's non-institutional in one of the places outside of pretty much anywhere institutionally outside of Fox. I'm thinking about mainstream things. You really can't be the kind of Trump head he is, but he can and it doesn't matter. It doesn't even hurt him. Get out.
They heard him in getting other celebrity guests on his podcast. They don't care either. They are just completely orthogonal to everything that's happening because, as Ben Smith has argued in Traffic, these technologies empower the individual and the individuals are having power now over the institutions. And so what's happening, as dumb as it all is, is almost an insurgency.
You know, I do want to get into kind of the setup that they've created here. This Derek character... So the...
I'm familiar with this mostly because I consume being, being an elder millennial, I consume barstool content, which is designed for people who are, you know, 40 years old and pretend like they are fresh out of college. And, and I find some of it amusing and some of it tiresome. I'm not really into the, the faux soap opera aspects of some, some of it, but I do think that, you know, the,
this interesting approach to how we're going to promote gambling. You know, we've talked about, we've talked about, you know, fracking the pie and that kind of thing, as you, as you have coined it. That, that's an interesting sort of challenge in the sense that, you know, we don't, we want to hype up gambling for these people who are going to be gambling with very low amounts of money.
How do we do that? Well, we do it with basically a shtick, a story, a narrative that we're putting in front of them with regularity. And in the case of this setup, that involves the twins paired with other personalities in order to tell a story. And what is that story? Well, in the case of Derek, Derek was the first guy...
that they had the meat on camera and everything is in this weird zone, this liminal zone between contrived and real, but they contrived a meeting with Derek. Derek is this scrawny kind of, kind of guy. And it was an odd interaction to watch because I didn't know any of the backstory when I watched it. And I'm actually in the back of the shot that they, uh, at, at better, we haven't even seen the scene said the name of it, but Jake Paul's content shop better that they put on. Yeah.
Yeah, better. But...
I do want one of those shirts. One of those shirts is – Oh, yeah, me too. 1-800-GAMBLER-SHIRTS. I kind of want that as well. I think that's kind of a cool, ironic shirt that they had there. At this gambling company, they had 1-800-GAMBLER-T-SHIRTS, and that's a real hotline for if you have a gambling problem. I said it's like back in the early 2000s when stoners wore those dare shirts. But anyway, I'm getting far afield. So Derek –
they meet Derek and they're filming it and he seems put off and he asks them if they're going to make gambling picks and they say yes and he goes, well, that's kind of my job and he looks humiliated. I'm watching it and going, what is even happening here? And then I dig into it and Derek's whole shtick
is to make bad picks and humiliate himself, and everybody laughs at what a loser he is. And they then spun that off where the Cavenders were going to the Miami Heat playoff games, and they were winning their bets, and poor Derek was losing their bets, and they were taunting him. And then there are other clips, actually, where Jake Paul is...
bullying him and it's the broadest stupid comedy it's just this guy this guy is very confident and all his picks are wrong but then you step back from it and you realize that there might be a method to the madness and that Jake Paul I mean whatever you think of him is amassed
quite a career for himself. And I believe the thought process is this is habituating young men into losing money towards the better coffers or perhaps looking at this guy and going, I could do better than Derek. And by God, Derek is hanging out with the Cavenders. So as bad as Derek is doing, even though he's losing, that's a pretty good deal he has right there. I don't know if that's an effective strategy, but I do believe it is the strategy. They didn't just do it arbitrarily.
Here's why I will tell you that is an effective strategy for about the first half of this past NFL season. Um, Barstool's big cat could not buy a win. Like his, his vibe was just completely off for like the first seven, eight weeks of the, this past NFL season. Um,
him was so satisfying because, because he would obviously post on social media about like his various picks. And he had, again, it actually even led to obviously this lawsuit, this hilarious lawsuit about the quote unquote, can't lose parlay at that point where, you know, they've actually had to defend in court that no reasonable person would believe that the can't lose parlay cannot lose. And,
which is it's particularly funny because they're having to defend it over a week in which you can't lose par well i actually won it's amazing but it's very satisfying when you personalize the bet and this is actually something that i think they're here's my theory of it my theory of it is people actually when you beat an app it's not very satisfying like you feel good about it for an instant but it's like
Okay, well, you know, but I beat the app. You know, I made a bet against essentially the app, the house, you know, pen or, you know, whatever better or something like that. And then afterwards, it's like, okay, well, that means I have another $100 to play with on this app. It doesn't actually satisfy. What's more satisfying is when you place a bet and you beat someone who either you know
Or is famous, meaning that you've gone up against somebody who is famous and beat them. And then you get this satisfaction of like, I was right and they were wrong. You know, if it was somebody you knew, you would just bust their balls over it, you know, for a week or so. You know, I can't believe that you had the Knicks, you know, in that series or something like that. But I think that that's kind of what they're trying to restore on some level is that
This feeling of, you know, someone who took the other side of this bet and that gives you something that can be more satisfying than just, you know, I click the right button on the app at the, on the right number on the right amount in order to come out on the winning side.
That's so, see, I didn't even think about that aspect of it, but I think that's a really, that's a really good insight into what's being attempted there. And I do think it's all very sleazy and all very seedy. There's something sad about how these content factories can't just be profitable on their own.
Um, that's the other takeaway that even something as popular as barstool, which has built its own little world and it became a destination website in an era where there are only a few destination websites, even they have to become ultimately a subsidiary to gambling, uh, to big gamble, uh,
And there's something to that. And then it just becomes about upselling atomized young men into betting increasing amounts of money. You mentioned parlay. That's a huge aspect of what the gambling companies want to do, because the dirty secret about sports gambling is.
is that you actually can win money betting sports. It's a little bit like blackjack in that if you know what you're doing, you're going to win money over time. And if you don't know what you're doing, then the odds are not so bad that you're going to get destroyed if you're just any way responsible.
But parlays, which combines a bunch of bets, and when you really think about it, the way probabilities work, once you go, hey, what's the chance of me hitting this shot that's 50% two times in a row, it drops to 25. I mean, that's what's happening with the conjoined bets. So...
But much of their money is coming off of parlays, and the entire game is going to be increasingly tricking people or making people think this is the way to do it. And I do think at a certain level you do need to habituate them to the loser feeling because there's just going to be a lot of losers, and I think that's part of what's being attempted here. And you want them to lose in a way that they feel like they almost got it.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Parlay. Parleys are good for it. It's the it's the carny game is what's going on with the parlays. Parlays are perfect for that because it's like I hit the first four. And if only that had gone this way, then the fifth one would have hit that. That sort of thing, that attitude is what keeps people coming back. My question to you is, you know, where does this go? Because clearly there is.
Clearly, there's an appetite for this. Clearly, there's a huge amount of interest in it. There's billions of dollars being spent in this area. But I feel like there's a pendulum swing. I feel like there's something that comes back against this in the sense that, like, the court can allow that the Supreme Court can allow something like this. But then I feel like politicians start paying attention to it and they start saying, you know.
Who's being exploited here? Are these gambling companies, are they ripping off basically a bunch of young people who don't know any better? All they have to have is enough college age sons and daughters of senators and congressmen to get into a bad position over something like this for them to start paying attention to it. If there is a pendulum swing, what do you think it looks like?
Yeah, that's a great question. And to be clear, when you're an NCAA athlete, you still can't mess around with this. The Cavenders immediately leapt into gambling after retiring from the NCAA. And I think what's interesting there is that they were making millions off being college basketball players and decided to quit when they had another year left because the money was good enough for them to do it. But I do think there will be an eventual pendulum swing back because...
Well, A, I'm getting feedback from people in England and in Australia where they liberalized and legalized sports betting before the United States. Most trends...
Go United States to those places and they catch the tail end of what we're doing. But this has been reversed. And I was actually on Australian television last week, and it was almost like somebody from the future trying to warn me of what's ahead because I don't think it's worked out too well. It doesn't seem to drive enough revenue.
tax-wise to really justify all the destroyed lives. And it's a big challenge because if you're libertarian-minded, then your attitude is justifiably perhaps, well, this is what adults are doing with their money, and I don't want to stand in the way of freedom.
But I also don't know if we were ever designed to be able to bet vast sums of money on our phones. And as I get older, increasingly my political heuristic, such as I have one, is how did that work out? It's how did that work out-ism. If in 2020, if they had defunded the police—
And crime plummeted. I would go, OK, like apparently that's what needed to happen. You know, it didn't it wasn't intuitive to me. I wouldn't have expected it. But now my mind has changed and that's the thing to do. And so increasingly, I view a lot of political scenarios less out of principles or priors and more from the perspective of.
is this going to work out? What is this going to look like? And I suspect with this... It's kind of a Chestertonian fence situation, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We're removing the fence right now. We're going to remove the fence. We're going to see how it works. If it doesn't work, we've got to put the fence back. Yeah, yeah. If when you take the fence away, just...
Billions of dollars flood out of the pockets of college-aged men on the other side of it, then I don't know if that's really what we want out of a society when – and there's this other thing that happens. It's so difficult with Vice.
I don't want to obviously be throwing anybody in jail for gambling. But I think when you send the signal that this is totally mainstream, there's no kind of stigma at all to any of this, then you flip the other direction. And I don't know if at scale that's something that's really good for us when that becomes an advertisement on Amazon.
every single basketball and football game you watch that this is the thing to do. I feel similarly about weed where I don't want to throw people in jail for smoking weed, but I'm also a little bit wary as to what happens when it becomes so corporatized and mainstream. And I've got those reservations about,
You know, is this really working out in the aggregate with gambling? I suspect that we're going to look back a few years from now and go, yeah, we got to regulate this a little bit more. Maybe people are allowed to do it, but maybe it can't be advertised on the airwaves, kind of like you couldn't advertise hard alcohol back in the day. And, you know, perhaps some of my libertarian friends are going to say that's messed up or this is that this or that bad externality.
But I'm probably going to hew towards if it's working out bad, we maybe need to do something. Maybe it's a good thing that Adam Sandler had to go see Mike Francesa. Yes, that's a good argument. And people would have counterarguments. People would say that the black market of gambling, which you're alluding to in Uncut Gems, which –
That's not a very realistic portrayal of how it actually goes, by the way, as entertaining a movie as it is. Maybe that's better because you have fewer normal people. Because gambling addiction just seems to be one of these things where there are a lot of upstanding family people who can be responsible in all other aspects of life but for this one. I don't know what it is about gambling, but you just hear a lot of stories like that.
And that's very anecdotal. As I know, Richard Hanania was saying that, well, these are losers with poor impulse control and, you know, represent itself. It would represent itself in any which way. And I don't have a statistical case to make against that. It's more anecdotal that there are actually a lot of people who aren't losers who still wipe themselves out doing this. And I don't think that's good. I don't think that's good for society. There are a lot of upper middle class dads.
whose gambling habits determine the quality of summer camp that their kids are going to go to. Yeah, I know one particular major broadcaster, and I'm not going to reveal who because I'm not sure if he's talked about it, but he talked about how his father was one of these people with a great job and a great income who died suddenly and left him basically with nothing because he was always in with the bookies. And yeah, I don't know of making it
uh more omnipresent to where if you have a problem you can't get away from it i don't think that's what's good for society in the aggregate and i say that as somebody who likes to bet an occasional game i'm not you know a prude about it i'm just watching and i'm going yeah you know my spidey sense is tingling here this doesn't seem to be going the right direction so uh so let's wrap up with this you know just sort of looking back at this experience you you cover uh these personalities uh
they get mad at you and it blows up because they're good clickbait and it gets more attention. But it seems to me that there are actually a couple of takeaways from it that could be perhaps lessons for other people who are going to emerge with similar advantages, whether they're women or not. What did you kind of take away from the
the overall experience, is this something that, you know, if I don't, you know, I have daughters, uh, I read this piece and I would say, I would want them to not go down this road because I would want them to have something that was, uh, you know, more tied to, uh, their abilities on the court or their abilities as it related to, you know, being an athlete, um,
That could, you know, elevate them to a higher level as opposed to kind of turning that into influencer bait or however you want to sort of think about it. What were the basic lessons that you would take away, you know, for the listener who has a kid who's in high school who might be about to go to college and and maybe, you know, could end up in the NIL? What would you what would what advice would you give them?
Ooh, it's a really good question because I actually did talk to a few athletes and I didn't quote them who had modest NIL deals and weren't pursuing that. And that's a lot to ask of somebody if they think they can make a lot of money and they see their teammate making a lot of money. But all money ain't good money. And I don't think becoming such a parasocial bug light in that particular way for that particular reason is...
is something that's easy to handle psychologically for a young person, be they technically an adult or not. And so the Cavenders, here's a part about it that I think is maybe underrated, is that I think being twins allows them to have some ballast to withstand some of the deranging aspects of that, even if I don't
you know, I agree with their response to the piece and I find it completely absurd. I think that they, they don't see, they didn't seem crazy. They seem polite. They seem nice. For all I know, the response is another work to get more attention, which is the business they're in. But if you're not a twin and you're just on your lonesome doing this, I think it's,
It's really easy to go crazy when you're in the public eye. And especially if you're in the public eye, as you're saying, not for your words, not for your deeds, but that you're alluring to young men. I mean, I guess some people are going to use it and they'll...
be comfortable in how they use it. And these, these are the rules and all that. But yeah, I think if I had a daughter in that situation, I'd probably want her to handle it a little bit more similar to some of the other women in college basketball. I talked to who are more low key and might have a sponsor or two, you know, you know, like a brick and mortar, whatever, raise money for some good organization. I think that that seems to be better.
Not better B-E-T-R, but B-E-T-T-E-R. Last question. It's completely unrelated. What do you think about this Porzingis deal?
I don't know. I haven't even really looked into it too deep. My dumb guy take on the whole thing is that Porzingis is one of these more in theory than in practice kind of guys where it seems cool to have a guy who can stretch the floor, but...
I completely agree.
I do follow a lot of league trends. I do have conversations with a ton of people in basketball. I don't watch games anymore. I don't. I don't have time for it. I watched some playoff games. You're producing subset content and podcasts instead of watching games. Yeah.
That's it. I can't do everything. And my kids are home in the evening. So I can't – at this age, daddy can't just be looking at a screen. And so the time is spent calling people, talking to people, reading about events. But I – back in the day when I was a sports – like a real sports reporter, I would be watching a ton of games. Yeah. It was – I do. It was –
It wasn't so long ago. But no, I spent most of my time either with family, writing, reporting. And so it's funny because there are a lot of people in basketball ops who are subscribed to my sub stack, HouseofStrauss.com, subscribe today. But sometimes they'll be having conversations with me, and they'll mention, yeah, we're on this big losing streak. And I go, I actually didn't know that. I had no idea. I don't know.
what's going on like that. I follow other issues that this might not even make sense to some of your listeners, but I feel like if you read my site, you would understand how I could cover sports without really watching them like I did in the past. Yes, yes. Well, you're covering a lot of things. You're also covering the vibes, and the vibes actually matter. Ethan, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thanks for having me, Ben. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
So just a little bit of perspective on sports for me, because we don't typically talk about it on this podcast. You know, I have been frustrated really for years at the degree to which sports writing, sports columnists in particular, have experienced a series of decades of decline and
There was once a point where sports columnists were really dominant in terms of their influence, not just on fan bases, but on teams, on the behavior of certain franchises and the like. The frustrations of major owners and team backers and others with these writers were obviously quite well known.
And whether that was something that took place around draft time for the NFL or the MLB or whether it was taking place in terms of the treatment and coverage that was received via sports talk radio and the like in major American cities. It was something that I thought was at least entertaining, at least something that would inspire notice.
But what's become, you know, I think far more prevalent in the age of ESPN, even as it dwindles in terms of its viewership and looks more and more at turning into a streaming product, the simple fact is that they have nationalized and dumbed down the conversation around sports. So instead of actually having serious analysis of what's going on,
in the field of play, what you have is this kind of mediocre content that is designed to be kind of a dollar menu approach to sports takes that is meant for the masses. And then you have things that are more niche and much more high end, I would say, in the sports podcast world and in the world of gambling analysis and the like. The simple fact is that as much as people might rag
you know, entity like, like Barstool Sports and say that it's, you know, something that, you know, has dumbed down the product to sort of a frat boyish, you know, cavalcade of different characters that they've created. When you listen to the interviews that take place with top athletes,
you are more likely to get a breakdown of different plays, why they worked, why they didn't work, or different approaches and strategy than you are likely to see on any of these programs. I think, for instance, just in terms of something that happened really amazingly a few years ago, there was an off-air kind of conversation that happened on the set of Baseball Tonight.
involving Alex Rodriguez and a number of other individuals where they were talking about their strategies when it came to batting approaches. And that really went viral because people are actually interested in that kind of thing. They're not interested in the stupid commentary that you hear from most of these entities. Sports fans are smarter than you think they are. And they really dig into and want to know more about the strategies involved
in various plays, in the decisions that a coach is making, etc. And I think that that's something that unfortunately much of our sports media has lost and they're not really interested in bringing it back. They just want the kind of dumb coverage, who's up, who's down. They don't want to actually dig into the different aspects of various games, various contests.
that actually make the difference and that give you a greater perspective on the level of skill these top-tier athletes are actually deploying when it comes to these things. Instead, it's just turned into essentially pro wrestling or something like that where they're just characters who are in a preordained game or something like that.
And I find that to be, you know, frankly offensive as a fan. I would much rather have people who are close to the games, close to the players, pay attention to these things are in locker rooms are covering things from a perspective that is much more informed and reported journalism opinion, as opposed to the way that things are done today. When you can have Tony Kornheiser living out in Delaware and
Mike Wilbon living out in Arizona, and both of them are the top columnists when it comes to a major city that they don't live in or near. It's absolutely disgusting, and I think that it's by far time that we moved away from such a model of this type of nationalist approach to sports that makes no distinction about where you're from or what you know.
I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be back soon with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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