College Football is Right-Wing Art

CULTURE

And it has a patronage network

By Barry Weiss · September 3, 2026 · 7 min read

I got a buddy who gave $50k last year to a major Midwestern SEC football program. Instead of donating to the program at large, he directed it to one specific black redshirt sophomore, a backup linebacker and special teams player. My buddy is obsessed with this kid. Specifically, his legs, calves, quads, and hamstrings. He pauses Instagram reels and zooms in on the 21-year-old’s lower-body. He calls one of the team’s grad assistant trainers weekly to ask about the kid’s diet, workout routine, and “physical progress.” We got dinner a month ago, and he spent a solid hour sharing pictures and talking about this kid’s body with the same look in his eyes as the girlfriend in Obsession.

I got another buddy who funds a lot of “right-wing” art projects. It’s not Peter Thiel, but it’s a guy who gets an invite to his Christmas party. He regularly writes checks to new right-wing publishers, debate societies, members clubs, and most of all salons. Right-wingers are completely obsessed with salons. No, not a party; it has to be called a salon. Parties are for poor people who have sex; salons are for aristocrats who quote Spengler.

But the reality is that Friend #1 is doing what Friend #2 wishes he was doing: actually funding real right-wing art that makes an impact on the world.

True right-wing art is not about giving residencies to Substackers. It’s about funneling real money from Jewish finance executives and Oil & Gas tycoons into college programs full of massive black teenagers. It’s about making sure they have top-tier trainers and nutritionists and then having them run into each other so hard and so fast they get life-altering CTE. The financiers are the Medicis, the coaches are Michelangelo, the players are the Sistine Chapel.

James Woods, Randy Quaid, and Owen Benjamin are all washed. Weinstein, Ratner, Moonves—all cancelled. Clint Eastwood’s been dismissed as senile after talking to invisible Obama at the Oscars. And it’s not just the movies. There isn’t a mainstream openly right-wing actor, writer, musician, or visual artist who hasn’t been at some level cancelled, dismissed, or pushed out.

For this reason, many conclude there is a vacuum of right-wing art. Again, they just don’t know where to look.

A hundred thousand people show up 10 Saturdays a year to Kyle Field to watch Texas A&M. Hundreds of college stadiums are filled with crowds that make any opera or classical concert hall look like a middle school theater in North Dakota. If you define “right-wing art” as the celebration of hierarchy, discipline, tradition, and ritualized violence, then college football is the most successful art patronage system in the history of the world.

Patronage does not specifically mean sponsoring fruitcakes to sculpt marble; it’s generally about investing in human potential, under elite supervision, to create something in the image of God.

Consider Michelangelo. He grew up in a quarry, had his talents recognized at 13, and was doing paid art at 14. Enormous resources were put into his training. He carved La Pietà at 24.

Today, the alumni booster recruiting pipeline identifies promising pre-teen football athletes at age 14. They’re equipped with a personal trainer, meal stipends, and supplements. Thousands of dollars pass to him and his family through shady agents and managers.

Whether you’re a Renaissance painter or an NCAA booster, raw material is identified early, shaped by experts, and funded by elites for public display.

Today, the sculptors and patrons of student-athletes are the moneyed men that support them. A college football prospect is the block of marble (well, onyx). To chisel this point home: today’s Michelangelos are the coaches and trainers (who are themselves handsomely rewarded). Their modern-day patrons are the boosters. Phil Knight is Don Patron di Oregon’e.

But Phil Knight is a less interesting example. Because of his vast wealth and ties to Oregon, his sponsorship of a five-star recruit is pure matter of course.

More interesting is the smaller-size booster giving $50,000 to support a three-star recruit and then calling the player’s position coach for updates on the progress of his pet monster.

Boosters are the true right-wing art enjoyers. They tend not to get directly involved with the player, but they’ll talk to the linebacker’s coach or a grad assistant trainer who’s working him out.

The fact is that the middle-tier donors can’t really call up Renzo Piano and say, “Build me an Art Deco museum,” but they can call up a Big Ten school and say they want to help make a black teenager’s deltoids as bulbous as humanly possible.

This used to be illegal and required “brownbaggers” to hand the athletes cash under the table, but since the Supreme Court’s Alston decision, it’s all above board. In the old days, the money would go right to the players’ uncles and stepdads, who would blow it all in a matter of weeks on strippers and spinning rims. These guys would receive regular DoorDash deliveries of cash the size of the average suburban down payment and still be completely broke by 22.

I once asked a booster of the U (University of Miami) football program to describe his role, and his answer was disarmingly simple:

“I literally pay for black kids I don’t know to go dominate other black kids.”

Think about the art of football versus all other performance art. One is a marketplace for pure egomania; the other is a self-reinforcing hierarchy machine. There’s a reason everybody pays attention to the art of body sculpting and nobody pays attention to the theater kids’ productions.

While Leslie Wexner can never be the man in the arena, he can sponsor a group of promising scholars, get them into Ohio State, and have a frock of Chinese do their homework for them. And much like complaining to Jeffrey Epstein that his underage masseuse’s bosom wasn’t voluptuous enough to meet his erotic standards, he can now complain when his player’s quadriceps size doesn’t meet his homoerotic standards.

The storied history of this sort of natural selection process suffered a weird blip in the egalitarian 20th century, and we saw such artists as Donald “Negro Soldier” Sterling punished for saying the quiet part out loud. The Yacht People were picking up what he was throwing down, but were forced to remain silent. This occult system has been in place for decades.

Now that Joe Biden is dead, we’re once again allowed to say whatever we want. So let’s call it like it is: college football is the greatest and most powerful form of contemporary right-wing art.

Art is a celebration of beauty, beauty is truth, and the truth is power.

The Renaissance proved that power funds beauty, and that hasn’t changed. Donatello had Carrara marble; we have 220-lb. 17-year-olds from Atlanta who evolved to hunt cheetahs barefoot. In fact, today’s patrons are more selfless, more pure. When a 72-year-old Jewish orthopedic surgeon wires 100k to a linebacker at the University of Florida, he contributes to something larger than himself. No plaque with his name will rest outside a dingy library. But a freshman with the frame of a silverback gorilla will receive the world’s only honest form of reparations.