When future societies are digging through the rubble of the American empire, searching for what went wrong, the headline “Barstool Sports founder says he doesn’t really want Pete Carroll murdered” will be an instructive one. Barstool founder Dave Portnoy is an internet celebrity turned real life D-list celebrity thanks to his partnership with Fox Sports, and he is the avatar for the crisis of American masculinity. He posted a video over the weekend that I think serves as a metaphor for how Trump got elected. A bunch of aggrieved and broken guys like this gambling their life savings on sports, stocks and memecoins all convinced themselves that a con artist actually cared about them. Now much of the manosphere are realizing that they’re the ones who got conned, and some like Portnoy seem to be fraying at the edges.
PRISON FOR EVERYBODY!! THAT’S THE BIGGEST RIG JOB IVE EVER SEEN. INVESTIGATE THE NFL. INVESTIGATE PETE CARROLL. IVESTIGATE THE RAIDERS!!! pic.twitter.com/hpEr1JOiqm
Watching that video reminds me of how a study by University of Oregon economists found that “when sports gambling is legalized, the effect of NFL home team upset losses on intimate partner violence increases by around 10 percentage points.” Some may think that is an uncharitable shot at a big dumb baby just being a big dumb baby, but that big dumb baby was accused by several women in multiple Business Insider reports that they had sexual encounters with Portnoy that “turned into frightening and humiliating experiences,” with some women alleging that he “choked and filmed them without advance permission.” Portnoy sued BI over their reporting, and in 2022, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, and he dropped the appeal in 2023. He also led his followers to wage a harassment campaign against SoulCycle and his ex-girlfriend Jordyn Hamilton who he publicly accused of cheating on him with a SoulCycle instructor. Misogyny is a feature, not a bug, of Portnoy’s vision for Barstool.
Portnoy, and Barstool as a deliberate extension of his brand of misogyny, is the picture of America’s crisis of masculinity. The kind of weak man who shares the good times create weak men meme without any hint of irony. A fake tough guy who instigates infinitely more internet fights than real ones. Portnoy’s freakout over a bad gambling beat on just another NFL Sunday feels like a cultural totem. If future generations want to know what was the manosphere like, this whiny babybrained conspiratorial bullshit that doesn’t make any sense will summarize it for them.
This is honestly prison. I’ve never seen a shadier sequence in my life. Prison for Pete Carroll and that ref pic.twitter.com/UvZFnMwFl8
Let’s just take these points from a supposed football knower on Fox’s Saturday college football show one by one. Firstly, Portnoy asks “why are you spiking the ball with 16 seconds in a ten-point game?” Because they’re still trying to win Dave! It’s an infinitesimal possibility, sure, but at 16 seconds, the Raiders probably had just enough time to complete a hail mary for a touchdown, recover the onside kick, then throw another hail mary to try to win the game. It’s not over! It’s professional football, that’s why they’re trying to stop the clock you dumbass.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a spike in that situation” is such a perfect quote for our moment. A doofus pulling rank on all the football he’s watched to talk definitively about one of the most forgettable plays in sports. I’m sure Portnoy has perfect recall on all the ten point deficits with 16 seconds left that he’s seen. This is the Trump era bullshit-as-expertise style summed up in one quote. I’m dead certain I have seen a team spike the ball to stop the clock in a similar situation at some point in all the thousands of football games I’ve watched, because until the final seconds tick down on the clock, a two-score deficit is not a death sentence, but no one remembers the exact times it happened because we all have better things to do with our lives than remember the specifics of garbage time football. Just because the worst Masshole ever created put an unhealthy amount of money on Broncos -8.5 doesn’t mean the Raiders should just roll over and die. Portnoy needs more masculine figures like Herm Edwards in his life.
“I would honestly punch Pete Carroll right in his fuckin—whole fuckin face if I saw him.” No you fucking wouldn’t you wuss. I lived in Massachusetts for nearly the entirety of the Tom Brady era, and I have met thousands of mini peacocking Portnoys talking this kind of shit. The only ones who did throw punches after saying something like this subsequently got their asses kicked by the real Massholes you have to fear, the quiet ones. Portnoy clearly falls into the weak loudmouth bucket, and there is no doubt in my mind that he would get knocked out cold by the oldest head coach in the NFL. You think a guy who has spent the last 52 years of his life on a football field would be scared of a glorified 48-year-old YouTube pizza reviewer? Again, Portnoy provides a perfect avatar for our present deranged and exploitative American moment overflowing with fake tough guys where he turns a Jordan Peterson enthusiast and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist into the normal one in this situation. It’s all so childish and stupid and aggressively American.
Portnoy’s next very wrong grievance with the end of the game came on the delay of game penalty called on Broncos safety Brandon Jones. NFL rules state that you cannot lay on a player after a play to try to impede them getting back to line up for the next one, which is what Jones did, and as a Broncos fan, I think that was the right call. It was a dumb play by Jones because this is the one part of Portnoy’s video where unfortunately he was right, as the game was over after that catch. The Raiders were not going to be able to get another play off with the clock running, and Jones ever so slightly opened the door for some kind of goofy bullshit to happen by stopping it with a penalty. Portnoy says the Raider receiver grabbed him, then in the instant replay right after he says it, you can’t see any grabbing by the Raider receiver. Just a perfect Trumpian sequence by Portnoy there. Jones was pulling very classic shithousery you see every weekend in the NFL. Everything happening at the end of this game is exceedingly normal, making Portnoy’s unhinged reaction quite telling.
Next is where the SoulCycle cyberstalker again provides a helpful marker for our Idiocracy-laden society where he bungles basic math. He cannot understand why the Raiders kicked a field goal other than as a personal affront to his gambling account he has to keep refilling because he sucks at his chosen profession now supported by other people’s labor at Barstool, but again, actual football knowers understand the math the Raiders were working towards. You need two scores here; a field goal and a touchdown. That penalty practically gave them the field goal, and while yes, there wound up being not enough time left to both kick the field goal and try the onside kick, the Raiders are trying to win the game! That’s all that’s happening here! It’s a stubborn 74-year-old future Hall of Famer who every football fan knows very well at this point, doing what stubborn 74-year-old future Hall of Famers do and fighting until there’s no time left on the clock. This is sports. Not some grand conspiracy by the shadowy NFL elite to ruin your same game parlay.
It’s one thing to whine about a bad beat, we all do that. Hell, I still have nightmares over losing a pretty penny on the 2012 Belk Bowl backdoor cover, one of the worst gambling beats I can ever remember (featuring pre-Swiftie era Travis Kelce). Backdoor covers happen in gambling all the time and if you can’t deal with them without creating headlines about how you want to murder an old man, you shouldn’t be betting on sports for your own health. It’s so predictable that Scott Van Pelt has become famous in large part due to his regular Bad Beats segment on SportsCenter. One of the things that makes gambling fun and healthy when you’re not losing so much money that it leads you to threaten a head coach with murder is that many other people lost money on the insane Belk Bowl backdoor cover too, and I have made many a friendship at a lonely bar with other patrons who have suffered like me. Sports are supposed to be fun and a way to build community in the lone common space that America has left, not a financial scheme you spend all your time studying only to lose your house on it.
Real men move on with their lives after a disgusting beat like what the Raiders pulled on Sunday because it’s just sports betting. You don’t film two separate videos calling for murder and accusing the NFL of rigging one of the most meaningless games of the weekend that even my insane Broncos fan brain has a hard time getting worked up over. The impulse to film yourself ranting aimlessly about a thing that just happened has to be one of the worst traits of this era. I co-sign The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper here, I am now the craggy old man yelling at America’s myriad manchildren feeling like they were scammed over their Trump vote and telling them to grow the fuck up.
these guys are turning me into a 1950s dad. shut up, stop whining, and get a real god damn job
The downfall of American masculinity is Dave Portnoy. A misogynistic, uninformed, self-involved, fundamentally weak form of masculinity whose self-worth is tied to how well they can exploit exploitative industries like sports betting, day trading and crypto. People who got conned by Donald Trump and when confronted with a frustrating but ultimately small potatoes outcome, do not laugh and find levity in the madness of life, but become unglued and post videos of themselves calling for the murder of a 74-year-old football coach. It is tough being a man these days, but if you’re ever confused about where to go, doing the opposite of everything Dave Portnoy does is a great start.