Is LIV Dead?

January 20, 2026·1 hr 18 min·7 clips

Chuck Klosterman argues football will implode in 50 years because its financial growth makes it paradoxically more fragile.

LIV opens the agenda. Alex Kirshner starts with the PGA Tour looking close to burying Saudi-funded LIV Golf after a key player returns to the tour. Brendan Porath joins the golf talk. The point is not only competitive balance or player movement. It is geopolitics, run through sports. Then the show changes lanes. Kirshner and Ben air a long conversation with Chuck Klosterman about his book Football and the questions around it. Klosterman pushes back on neat origin stories. He argues that football's rise was absolutely an accident, even if Pete Rozelle later knew how to stretch that accident. The Civil War shadow matters. Klosterman describes an early belief that college football answered fears about young men dodging conflict and getting soft. That story is hard to prove. Still, it gave the sport a cultural job before television turned it into a national machine. The technology piece gets messier. Football was not built for television, and television was not built around football. The fit just happened. Klosterman calls it a weird coincidence of unlike things that fused into something unusually powerful. Baseball becomes the useful contrast. The familiar Rozelle-versus-baseball story comes off less like genius beating incompetence and more like timing turning into mythology. Indiana then gets its moment. The panel closes the loop on football with Indiana's national championship and the history made on Monday night. Even the bonus tease stays institutional. The Slate Plus segment points to the Dodgers, Kyle Tucker, and baseball fans making another case for a salary cap.

As heard by us

Sports talk that moves from golf geopolitics to college football history.

This episode moves from the PGA Tour and LIV Golf into a long talk with Chuck Klosterman, then on to Indiana's national championship and the history around it. Brendan Porath brings useful context on LIV, and the Klosterman interview takes up the longest stretch.

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Why you'd press play

If you want sports talk that connects LIV, Klosterman, and Indiana, press play.

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