Clay Travis answered the call. He was headed to pick up two of his sons “post-practice” and apologized. “If the call drops off, I didn’t hang up.” 

Like me, Travis has three boys. What is Clay Travis most proud of? His boys.  

We got the “politics” question out of the way early. Travis’ choice for president? Trump. 

He is going to vote for Trump and said, “It’s not a very hard choice to make, given the options.”

Travis has never shied from offering opinions that legacy media didn’t like. Travis welcomes his critics. The more, the better.  

Five years ago, Clay Travis appeared on CNN with host Brooke Baldwin. It was during that interview that Travis said that he believed in two things with absolute certainty: “the First Amendment and Boobs.” Baldwin was gobsmacked. Travis’ visibility was already rising, but that turn of phrase seemed to take his media exposure to a new level. CNN announced that Travis was henceforth banned from their news channel. Predictably, The Washington Post was offended as well. Oh, well. Thanks for the exposure, CNN, and WaPo. The more they complained, the bigger Travis got. The genie was out of the bottle. 

It's 2024 now. Brooke Baldwin is gone. Clay Travis and the site he founded, outkickthecoverage.com, are now just Outkick—and growing. 

We then got into the meat of the interview. I wrote an article about Dawn Staley being ok with biological men competing as trans-women against women. The question was asked by Outkick’s Dan Zaksheske. After a drink of water to clear her dry throat, Staley answered: “If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play, or vice versa, you should be able to play.” 

The “vice versa” seems to have implied that women could (if they wanted to) compete on a men’s team, but everyone knows that’s a strawman. Women are not invading men’s sports. Since Title IX was enacted, women have had their own space. At least, they did, until recently. 

The idea that men, who identify as women, and win women’s champions is absolutely insane to me. And I think it is absolutely insane to at least 90% of sports fans. Outkick is the only sports media company willing to ask that question of Dawn Staley, and two agree with 90% of sports fans who think this is crazy is a testament to several things – among them, a lot of people are lying… the idea that trans people are powerless is ridiculous. [People] are afraid that trans people will be angry at them… which is evidence of strong political power, and three, truth, actual truth can no longer matter in our country.

Dawn Staley can have whatever opinion she wants. She can say whatever she wants. Travis is a First Amendment absolutist. The root of the problem is cowardice. The NCAA has failed women. The NCAA has made the decision to allow biological men who identify as women to compete against women. 

Outkick is the only sports media organization willing to raise this issue. I’m proud to have founded Outkick and be an editorial voice on the issue of transgenders competing against women.

But with his pride in Outkick’s coverage comes sadness.

I am saddened by the fact that Outkick is the single sports media company on the planet that is advocating for women’s sports only to be made up of women, and it a sad reality that we have even got here.

We disagreed on the fix. I believe that women, en masse, should simply refuse to compete against biological men identifying as women. By doing so that mass boycott would force sanctioning bodies, like the NCAA, to reassess their competition-killing, women’s sports-ruining allowances.  

For Travis, putting the onus on women is the wrong approach. 

That’s why we have rules. If you worked your whole life to win a championship in a sport, the sport is failing if it puts someone like Riley Gaines in a position where the only way to respond is to not compete. That is the antithesis of what we want to teach athletes. You expect to compete. The coach, the adults, the rule-makers are failing the athletes in this respect. 

I understand the argument that every woman should have chosen not to swim against Lia Thomas, for instance, but then all those girls who spent their whole lives trying to win an NCAA championship are excluded from competition because of the failure of the adults and regulatory boards that allow this to happen. I don’t think it’s the fault of women athletes; I think it is the fault of the adults who run athletics on all levels. 

Every college coach should be on the record on this and maybe Outkick needs to deputize people all over the country and ask every women’s basketball coach, every women’s swimming coach and I think, they need to be on the record, I think this is an important question that goes to the very essence of women’s athletics itself.

The National Championship game between South Carolina and Iowa got the biggest rating in the history of women’s basketball, with 18.7 million people tuning in. There is no doubt that the game was a national talking point because it had star power. Caitlin Clark is the all-time scoring champion, and she and her teammates were pitted against Staley’s undefeated team. How much of the ratings boost was because of Outkick’s Dan Zaksheske asking an uncomfortable question, of both coaches? Other media tried to frame Zaksheske as a coward who ran away and didn’t ask Iowa’s coach. 

That claim was and remains patently false. Two hours after Zaksheske asked Staley “the question,” he asked the same question of Iowa’s coach. Coach Bluder demurred. 

Meet Dan. Dan is a coward who left the press conference after asking this question because Dan doesn’t care about basketball, or lifting up the amazing female athletes in the Final Four, or women in general. Dan is unlikely to ask this question of the other coach. Don’t be a Dan. https://t.co/AsiIEKpz6m

— Forrest L. Alton (@ForrestLAlton) April 6, 2024

Should biological men be allowed to compete against women? 

At least Staley answered the question. 

For Travis, the question and the answer are binary. It may be uncomfortable for coaches to answer, but it needs to be asked of every women’s coach. 

The Dawn Staley answer got a lot of attention, but we asked Iowa’s women’s coach [Lisa Bluder], and she declined to answer given the big game coming up… when is she going to answer? The season is over – what is her opinion on this matter? I think it is a time for choosing, for anyone involved in any way with women’s athletics. 

Every women’s NCAA tournament coach should be asked this question. I think anyone looking to compete for a championship should be asked this in every sport. I think the NCAA has a responsibility to follow the lead of the NAIA and ban men who identify as women from being able to compete for women’s championships. Look, at some point, inclusion becomes exclusion; that is, trying to include men in women’s sports excludes women from being [able] to participate. 

What is disappointing to me, is that organizations like Outkick ever had to get involved in this. I don’t see how feminist, how Title IX advocates, step back and allow the ultimate sign of the patriarchy, men being able to claim that they are women’s champions or ‘Women of the Year’ in an athletics event. It’s absolutely crazy. I think society as a whole is failing these college athletes.

We talked about a recent claim by a CNN host who posted on “X” that there are “only” 33 biological men competing on women’s teams under the NCAA umbrella. Travis drew an apt analogy: 

Take it outside of the trans issue: If someone said, 'There are only 33 baseball players that are using steroids, it is not that big of a deal,' you would say that those 33 are really getting a competitive advantage. If you said, 'Yea, 12U little is mostly 12U, but there are only 33 players who are actually 16 or 18 years old but identifying as 12, it’s really not changing anything'…33 spots that men are taking from women’s athletics, it should be zero. 

But it’s a growing number because I can guarantee you a decade ago, there weren’t 33, and who’s to say if we don’t stop it, there’s not going to be 333 or 3,000? It’s only getting worse.

Travis made some more points to consider.

We are not giving this issue up…we need a man to decide to identify as a woman and become a Lia Thomas style situation in a sport that is more public than [college] swimming is. We need a guy who has been on a men’s basketball team for three years to flip and decide to become a woman. Or we need someone in men’s tennis to decide...to contend to win a tennis tournament — we almost need that to happen, which feels inevitable to me — before people will acknowledge how different it is from a competitive mindset. 

Outkick is not stopping on this story.  We are winning this war and the media is far behind in the way that it's covering it. 

Travis hopes that other media will ask “the question” but he isn’t confident any will. When NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) became “the question” for men’s college sports, Nick Saban was asked what he thought of NIL at almost every media event. Transgender athletes competing against biological women seems to be “the question” to ask moving forward. Will other media ask it? Unlikely. 

Will Outkick be the only sports media to ask “the question” from what Travis calls "Sanity Island"? 

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