A notable element for many sports media personalities over the past few decades has been the importance of their fandom. From Bill Simmons and Boston teams through Will Leitch and the Cardinals (both baseball and football!) to Jimmy “Jomboy” O’Brien and the Yankees, wearing specific fandoms on one’s sleeve has been significant for many of those figures. And that includes quite a few of the personalities at Barstool Sports. With that in mind, it’s significant to see one of Barstool’s longest-tenured and highest-profile figures in Dan “Big Cat” Katz, perhaps known especially for his discussion of Chicago teams, talk about how that wasn’t always the story of his fandom.
Since he started at Barstool in the early 2010s, Katz has been known for providing a Chicago perspective. That continued even when he was based in New York out of their main offices, and it was particularly emphasized when he was tabbed to lead their $20 million opening of a Chicago office in November 2023. But, as Katz noted in a piece he published on Barstool’s website Wednesday (titled “Lets Rip The Old Band Aid Off Once And For All”), he’s actually from Newtown, MA, grew up rooting for Boston teams, and only took Chicago teams from his second-favorite to first-favorite around the start of his time working for Barstool.
Perhaps most interestingly, Katz wrote there about why he didn’t discuss his fandom origins when he started leading Barstool’s Chicago site. He said that came following a conversation with Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, and following the reception the previous site leader got after revealing he wasn’t initially from Chicago:
That kind of sets the stage for where I was. Living in Chicago, happy as could be but wondering if there was something else out there for me. And that’s when I started blogging. When I started I knew that Dave was covering Boston, Kevin/Keith New York and no one was in Chicago. So I threw myself into Chicago sports. I fully adopted those teams, learned their history, which I had known a decent amount from my Uncle, and began rooting for all of them.
As I did that my love for Boston sports began to fade. If I was going to root for the Chicago teams I had to shut off rooting even a little bit for Boston teams anymore. By the way maybe the worst trade of all time rooting for Tom Brady to rooting for the Chicago Bears. Dave initially offered me the job in 2010 but the timing wasn’t right for me personally. I thought it was too risky and didn’t think I was good enough to do it at that time. So for the next 2 years I kept blogging and working on it and getting better.
In 2012 Dave announced he was opening Barstool Chicago with a guy named Neil, shout out Neil, genuinely a great ******* dude. Neil, like me, lived in Chicago but wasn’t originally from here and when he started he got skewered for that. He never had a fair shot and it sucked for him beyond belief because he was just trying to do his job to the best of his ability.
I took a part time role blogging for Barstool and when it wasn’t working out for Neil, Dave offered me the full time job again. Dave knew my background and we talked about what the best plan of attack was for my start. We agreed the best course of action was to not mention my childhood or that I used to root for Boston teams and to just throw everything I had into Chicago, covering their teams, everything going on in the city and blogging about everything on the internet etc.
Katz also went on ESPN 1000 Chicago’s Waddle and Silvy to discuss this Wednesday:
An interesting side element of this is that Katz hasn’t fully tried to keep this secret for all that time. Indeed, a Reddit thread from 2017 discusses Katz talking about his upbringing on a recent episode of Portnoy’s podcast and the differing reactions people had to that revelation, from bothered to not bothered. (That thread does suggest Katz definitely didn’t talk about this when he started doing Chicago blogging for Barstool, though, and even DMed one person asking them to take down a tweet about where he was from.) But Katz certainly hasn’t been too open about it, and he wrote about some of the anguish that caused him:
Looking back on this moment it’s my biggest regret that consumed me for many years. Why didn’t I just explain myself from the jump? I think my talent would’ve shown through regardless where I grew up. But the best thing for Barstool was for me to throw myself 100 percent into the job and work my ass off to make Barstool Chicago work. And that’s exactly what I did.
Anyone who knows me from 13 years ago knows I worked my ass off. I became obsessed with Chicago sports, I became obsessed with blogging, I became obsessed with my job and I worked really really hard at it. I also knew that I couldn’t hold any of my old allegiances because it would be even more unfair to the audience if I did that. I cold turkey stopped rooting for any Boston teams. Super Bowls meant absolutely nothing to me, I basically shut off that entire part of my life and rooted my dick off for all things Chicago as much as they sucked at basically everything.
As the years passed by Barstool kept growing, I kept working and my past snowballed into something I would actively avoid. I omitted it all from my mind and content, because I wanted people to know I genuinely cared about the things I talked about and blogged about, which I did.
…It was my job to cover the city and I took it very seriously. I threw myself all in and never looked back. People would bring it up to me online and I would DM them to please stop because I thought in my mind it would ruin me and my career. Thats so stupid looking back on it. I feel so much shame for avoiding it all costs. It was a molehill that I made into a mountain in my head.
And I know at the end of the day its not like I was hiding a murder or crime or something horrific, its hiding that I switched teams, some people would care but most would still like the content I was producing and the fact that I was proudly representing the city I had grown to deeply love and the teams that I had 100 percent adopted.
Why I did this I still can’t quite answer except for the fact that I was scared and acted irrationally. And in my head as long as I gave everything I had and rooted as hard as I could for Chicago teams it didn’t matter.
How much any of this actually matters depends on perspective. Katz, like many figures at Barstool, is known not just for individual points or takes he makes, but for his personality and fandom. Many fans and viewers who like him may not care at all that he adopted Chicago teams later in life, and did so at least partly for a specific blogging role, and was reluctant to fully admit publicly that when taking that role or for more than a decade after.
And there certainly are plenty of people who have changed fandoms over their lifetimes. And many of those may relate to Katz here. And it’s also worth noting that a huge amount of people in the more traditional sports media world who are widely associated with particular teams, from local TV or radio announcers to radio or TV hosts and columnists, often didn’t grow up in the city they’re most connected with, or even start their media careers there.
But Katz’s situation is a little different, considering that he’s someone who made his personality and fandom such a key part of his content. And him not being fully open about his fandom history for so long may disillusion some who had previously liked him. Still, it doesn’t seem too likely that there’s going to be a wide-ranging abandonment of him over this, especially with most of the comments on his article seemingly in support of him.
The more significant point here may be about why this is notable with Katz and Barstool in a way it might not be elsewhere. Especially in the largely post-blog, heavily-syndicated era we see at the moment, the background of an author of a particular web article isn’t of all that much interest to many readers, who are there for the particular content.
But podcasts and video content center creators and their personalities much more. And Katz is maybe more famous in that realm (especially with the success of Pardon My Take, now even getting cited by Jim Harbaugh) than he ever was as a blogger. And Barstool centers personalities more than just about anywhere else (which is tied into the publicization of various internal dramas there), and emphasizes fandom and fans’ perspective more than just about anywhere else. So a discussion about one of their biggest personalities’ fandom history, and why he’s now opening up about that after more than a decade of not really discussing it, does have some significance.
All in all, any actual impact from of Katz’s comments here is up to his fans. And the sentiment in the comments on his article suggests most are just fine with him not being initially from Chicago and growing his Chicago fandom partly in response to a career opportunity, so this probably won’t amount to much.
But the language Katz uses to discuss this in both his article and his radio interview here, including “biggest regret” and “I feel so much shame for avoiding it at all costs,” indicates the importance he placed on this for many years. And he even writes about losing weight amidst stress over this, so it’s clear he certainly saw this as a big deal. And the whole situation does show an interesting element around Barstool and its employees, and how central personality and fandom is for many of those figures.