On the precipice of the sports-gambling gold rush — and facing sexual-misconduct allegations — Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy is doubling down on the culture war
Portnoy onstage at a Barstool party in 2017. Photo: John Parra / Getty Images/2017 Getty Images This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Portnoy founded Barstool Sports in 2003 as a free newspaper for lowbrow content aimed at men. Today, he is at the center of Barstool’s sprawling network of podcasts, livestreams, and YouTube shows, including one devoted to talking about what it’s like to be Dave Portnoy. The company expects to make $200 million in annual revenue next year.
Portnoy had managed to turn his defense against serious accusations of sexual misconduct into viral content. More than a million people have watched Portnoy’s press conference, and a day later, Barstool released behind-the-scenes footage of him preparing for the presentation and receiving a round of applause from his employees. “I am at the height of my powers,” he said on an episode of Davey Day Trader Global, his stock-trading show, while Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” played in the background.
One place where Portnoy’s fans were happy to talk was in the crowd at a live taping of the Barstool College Football Show, which Portnoy was hosting in Chicago on the last Saturday in September. “I need Portnoy,” a young man holding a sign that read I PUKED LAST NIGHT yelled at a tour bus with Portnoy’s face pasted on the side. The bus was in a parking lot just north of Soldier Field, where the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Wisconsin Badgers were about to play.
After graduating from the University of Michigan and spending a few years in sales, Portnoy launched Barstool in 2003 as a free subway newspaper kick-started by $25,000 from his parents. As the origin story goes, Portnoy took a trip to Las Vegas and met a few people from online casinos that needed places to advertise. Portnoy’s plan was to create a newspaper that catered to the casinos by catering to guys like him.
By this point, Portnoy and his writers were no longer cracking jokes exclusively for people who would pick up a newspaper with a college girl in a bikini on the cover. They were getting into spats on Twitter, filming themselves busting one another’s balls for YouTube, and discovering the peril and potential profit that could accrue to anyone willing to push boundaries online.
Interviewing President Trump in the Rose Garden in July 2020. Photo: Barstool Sports / Youtube By the mid-2010s, Barstool was profitable, but the company’s revenue had plateaued at a few million dollars a year. Portnoy had canceled the parties, which he said were more of a headache and a potential liability than they were worth. Some advertisers remained wary. Portnoy seemed to have found his ceiling: the King of the Massholes selling T-shirts to other Massholes.
The biggest blowup came at the end of 2017, when ESPN agreed to air a televised version of Pardon My Take, Barstool’s wildly popular football podcast. The show is hosted by Dan Katz and Eric Sollenberger, who go by Big Cat and PFT Commenter, respectively. They are the most popular Barstool personalities beyond Portnoy and the ones that even people who object to Portnoy or Barstool will admit to liking.
Multiple political commentators have suggested recently that we are witnessing the rise of the “Barstool conservative” — a largely male and white demographic that feels put-upon by the progressive strictures of modern society and enlivened by a rich, successful guy thumbing his nose at all that.
The pandemic also introduced new opportunities to stoke controversy. In May 2020, Portnoy delivered a pair of speeches in which he called Anthony Fauci “one of the great criminals of our civilization.” Portnoy was speaking out in defense of small-business owners who were losing their livelihoods in the face of government lockdowns; Turning Points, the conservative PAC, put Portnoy’s face on a flyer.
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