It has been more than 60 years since the first Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue hit newsstands, a moment in history that bound the business of sports journalism to the business of making sports fans horny.
What started as a way for bored SI editors to amuse themselves during the slow period of the sports calendar soon grew into an annual event capable of subsidizing much of the rest of the magazine. When sports bloggers eventually rose to power in the 2000s and early 2010s, they internalized the lessons of the swimsuit issue, and ate into SI’s subscription and advertising revenue. In their heyday, these bloggers’ randy posts about WAGs, cheerleaders, and random college students were given prominent placement on popular sports sites.
Almost two decades later, the vestiges of horny sports blogs are mostly contained on deserted websites. Remember Busted Coverage? All that’s left of its dedicated “girls” tab is an empty page, save for the word “GIRLS” splashed across the middle. Even OutKick (which employs Busted Coverage’s founder) and Barstool Sports are at a hot and bothered crossroads, as seen by the decrease in updates to the infamous “Barstool Smokeshow” vertical.
But there is at least one media executive set on bringing horny sports blogging back to the place where it all started: Former Sports Illustrated executive Chris Pirrone and his business partner Matthew Graham are now running a vertical under the SI umbrella called The Athlete Lifestyle, which manages to make the prior era of WAG blogs look like Proust’s adoring love letters by comparison. Pirrone—whose previous SI stint was viewed with “complete disdain,” a former staffer told me—has wriggled his way into the mix as an “independent publisher” operating within SI’s increasingly confusing editorial structure.
The Athlete Lifestyle is a true throwback. Take this post from Nov. 18, with the headline “Cowboys cheerleader Kylie Dickson flexes flawless kissy selfie before Texans game.” The first sentence: “If the Dallas Cowboys are ‘America’s Team’, then well, the Cowboys cheerleaders are ‘America’s Sweethearts.’” A little further down the page is an embedded Instagram photo of two cheerleaders who are indeed making kissy faces, followed by: “Wowza. It certainly is a happy game day even for non-Cowboys fans.”
Pirrone’s investment in The Athlete Lifestyle wasn’t on my radar until a hyperlink in The Cut led me to a blog about Travis Kelce missing part of his girlfriend Taylor Swift’s birthday party. I was struck by the vertical’s bizarrely phrased headlines, which repeated the same descriptors—“turns heads,” “flawless,” and “leggy,” among others—and fixated on the outfits and poses of a select group of women: the aforementioned Taylor Swift, Livvy Dunne, Hailee Steinfeld, Jordon Hudson (Bill Belichick’s much younger girlfriend), Vanessa Bryant and her daughter Natalia Bryant, the daughters of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, Brittany Mahomes, and a handful of big-name WNBA players, well-known TV personalities, and social media influencers.
Then I noticed that literally thousands of The Athlete Lifestyle posts, many of the horny variety, came from the same blogger: someone listed as Matt Ryan. When I first came across Mr. Ryan, and for months afterward, his profile page didn’t include a photo, a bio, or contact information. I figured this was not the Super Bowl-losing quarterback.
I was dumbfounded not just by Ryan’s style and subject matter, but by his output. I counted an average of nearly 10 posts per day appearing under his byline from November 2024 through March of this year. It does not appear that he has taken a single day off, including weekends, since Aug. 20, 2024. Who is Matt Ryan? How is he so prolific? Why is SI.com publishing so many of his cheesecake blogs? I wanted to find the human behind the byline, if there was one.
What I eventually uncovered was odd, to say the least, and depressing. The Athlete Lifestyle is part of a tangled mess of a sports media ecosystem, where “independent publishers” hop from one content mill to another, enticing aspiring sportswriters and linking up with other self-described digital entrepreneurs to pump out “content” under dubious bylines and pretenses.
The Athlete Lifestyle’s entire existence is owed to SI’s confusing digital divide. On one side of SI.com is a staff of full-time, unionized reporters and editors; they also produce a magazine you might have read. In recent years, they’ve been pleading for job stability and to not be lumped in with embarrassing scandals that aren’t their fault.
Current and former members of SI’s masthead are familiar with Pirrone because of his tumultuous tenure as the senior vice president and general manager of Sports Illustrated Media Group from June 2022 until January 2024. He announced ruinous layoffs in February 2023. Amidst the cutbacks, Pirrone's big editorial vision was to flood the zone with more content. In November 2023, Futurism reported that third-party product reviews published on SI.com were written by fake, AI-generated authors. SI’s publisher at the time, The Arena Group, issued a combative non-denial afterward. Then came a publishing rights tug-of-war that almost sunk SI for good. In January 2024, The Arena Group basically let go of everyone, Pirrone included.
It wasn’t until March 2024, when Minute Media acquired SI’s publishing rights, that things began to improve. A June 2024 Axios story credited Minute Media for rehiring much of the laid-off staff. Sports Illustrated’s editor-in-chief, Steve Cannella, has raved about Minute Media's support. In a December 2024 interview, senior writer Chris Mannix said Minute Media helped move SI away from a "churn" model.
Those are fair sentiments, at least among SI’s full-time journalists. But the “churn” model is alive and well on the other side of the digital divide, where Pirrone has quietly nestled into a comfortable content mill free of pesky, unionized journalists. It’s called On SI, a network of blogs about sports teams and niche interests (collectibles, sneakers, horny ogling) published under the SI.com domain.
On SI contributors are typically paid per article view as part of a revenue-sharing system instituted by “independent publishers,” who run the sports team/niche interest blogs in partnership with Sports Illustrated. The paid-per-clicks model is widespread and can be found at other sports sites like Fansided, Athlon Sports, and Yardbarker. To give you a sense of the potential money-making opportunities here: A recent Athlon Sports listing for a Cleveland Guardians freelance blogger offered between $2.50 and $5 per 1,000 pageviews. The specific payout rates depend on the generosity and SEO savvy of the “independent publisher.”
During Pirrone’s time as an SI executive, he was also in charge of the On SI network, previously referred to as FanNation; Minute Media rebranded it to On SI in August 2024. It’s unclear how long Pirrone has been buying up On SI blogs as an “independent publisher,” but I do know he owns more than just The Athlete Lifestyle, and he’s running them via his business called “CPMs,” a double entendre for “cost per mille” and “Chris Pirrone Media Solutions.”
Pirrone, who incidentally bought The Big Lead from Minute Media last year, and Graham were clearly able to convince Minute Media that The Athlete Lifestyle was a good addition to the On SI portfolio. It launched in July 2024, with Graham penning a mission statement about covering "all the eye candy around the game."
At any given time, there are a half-dozen semi-regular contributors to The Athlete Lifestyle, and some of their posts are pretty gross. Others are about run-of-the-mill trade rumors and less sexy gossip about male athletes. The Athlete Lifestyle’s absolute workhorse of a horny blogger, Matt Ryan, goes many steps beyond that. A sampling of his headlines:
- “Livvy Dunne's Christmas nightie gets her on Santa's naughty list”
- “ESPN’s Molly Qerim wags tongue teasing low-cut full-length dress”
- “Megan Thee Stallion grinding Angel Reese seductively wins Halloween parties”
- “Caitlin Clark hugs Iowa bff Kate Martin comically inappropriately (VIDEO)”
- “Josh Allen’s fiancée Hailee Steinfeld flexes toned legs disrobing skirt with holes”
- “Simone Biles reveals her shocking pants size, ‘struggle’ to find fit”
- “Sunisa Lee teases very grown up alluring bikini post”
- “Brittany Mahomes puts Patrick on dad duty being official breast-milk holder”
- “WNBA Toronto Tempo owner Serena Williams rocks biz heels, miniskirt fire fit with tie”
Matt Ryan’s posts are written in such a way that it’s kind of impossible to not think something weird is going on. For instance, a post with the headline “Bill Belichick’s gf Jordon Hudson makes lipstick mistake showing off secret skill" includes this indecipherable passage:
Bill Belichick’s girlfriend Jordon Hudson certainly has a big sense of humor, and now we know another talent at the same time.
The 24-year-old Hudson clearly likes to have fun with the 72-year-old Belichick like their hilarious Halloween costumes, and their epic fall photos in a corn maze, as well as her playing around like she’s part of his new North Carolina Tar Heels staff.
She’s also getting into the holiday spirit with her "naughty" fit with the coach.
What we didn’t know about Hudson was she could play a musical instrument and does so for a band performing in a concert. She revealed that while also shaming herself for wearing lipstick while practicing.
Matt Ryan also doesn’t have an easily searchable internet presence, as is the norm for people with regular bylines. Muck Rack, a PR service that scrapes the internet for journalism bylines and arranges them on dedicated author pages, has been tossing Ryan's Athlete Lifestyle stories onto the author page of a former Burlington Free Press reporter by the same name. I tracked that Matt Ryan down: He’s a teacher in Maine, and many years removed from the journalism world. He told me he’s not the mystery Matt Ryan.
My suspicions grew when I pieced together that Pirrone and Graham have been outsourcing an unknown portion of the writing and editing on The Athlete Lifestyle to a separate LLC. That LLC, Kings Digital Media, is listed as a place of work on a handful of LinkedIn profiles whose job responsibilities include writing and editing for On SI and/or The Athlete Lifestyle. Clicking into the Kings Digital Media LinkedIn page takes you to a Sri Lankan digital marketing company, which advertises its SEO services with a presumably AI-generated image of a lion wearing a suit and holding a gun. Naturally, I came to wonder if Matt Ryan is an amalgamation of Sri Lankan SEO specialists.
Wrong! Pirrone’s LinkedIn eventually provided an important clue. Last fall, he signal-boosted another independent publisher named Eli Lippman, who was “seeking sports and entertainment content creators to work across a number of tier 1 publishers.” Long story short: Lippman is the CEO of a different, much-harder-to-find Kings Digital Media—a non-Sri Lankan content mill that teamed up with On SI, Newsweek, Spin, and who knows which other media platforms. (LinkedIn seems to have accidentally hyperlinked the Sri Lankan company to the aforementioned writers’ and editors’ pages.)
In practice, this means Pirrone and Graham worked out a deal with Sports Illustrated to run The Athlete Lifestyle and make money off horny SEO posts; they’re also outsourcing some of the work to Lippman, a content-mill middleman and fellow “independent publisher” steering his Kings Digital Media contractors to various “tier 1 publishers” like SI.com. I wasn’t sure, and still am not sure, if Matt Ryan is contracted by Graham and Pirrone or Lippman. (Lippman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Who Matt Ryan actually works for is a less interesting question than how he keeps up his staggering publishing pace. Surprisingly, I picked up on signs that Ryan is not an AI creation. AI writing is boring, but grammatically correct and low on spelling errors. Just to be sure, I plugged Ryan’s posts into Pangram, an AI detection service that’s been used and cited by Wired, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and NewsGuard, which assigns news sites a rating based on their reliability and trustworthiness. None of Ryan’s posts came back as “likely AI.”
I contacted Pirrone and Graham, as well as Minute Media. At first, Graham responded on behalf of himself and Pirrone. I asked what the editorial purpose behind The Athlete Lifestyle is, to which he replied that the vertical is intended to cover “the daily happenings of athletes and those close to them through the lens of fashion, culture, music, etc.” Graham dodged my questions about The Athlete Lifestyle’s payment structure, how many of their contributors are contracted by Kings Digital Media, as well as the names of the other On SI verticals overseen by Pirrone.
I also asked if Matt Ryan was a real guy. Graham wrote back that Matt Ryan’s lack of contact information and bio was an “oversight,” and that they’ve actually worked together before. He sent along the LinkedIn profile of a man named Matthew Ryan, a former senior-level executive producer and digital strategist. Ryan’s bio says that he’s a “digital monetization expert.”
I followed up: Is it Graham’s and Pirrone’s position that Matt Ryan, and only Matt Ryan, has been posting under his byline? And separately, have any contributors to the On SI verticals that Graham and Pirrone oversee have been flagged for or accused of using AI?
Graham said he could assure me “there is no one else writing under Matt’s byline and that our regular internal AI checks have raised no flags about his content.” Interestingly, Graham did not directly respond to my question about whether any of their other On SI contributors were found to have used AI.
I asked that question not because of Matt Ryan, but another contributor to The Athlete Lifestyle whose writing raised alarm bells during my reporting. Kilty Cleary, a friend of Pirrone’s, wrote for The Athlete Lifestyle during the latter half of 2024. His posts aren’t horny, which is a pleasant surprise, but they read in the unmistakable cadence of a ChatGPT or Claude prompt response. Like this blog about a pair of vintage Deion Sanders shoes released by Nike: “Whether you’re tuning in to watch Colorado’s high-flying offense or lining up to snag the Diamond Turf Retros in February, one thing’s for sure: Deion Sanders knows how to keep the spotlight exactly where it belongs—on him. And let’s be honest, would we want it any other way? Prime Time is alive and well, both on and off the field.”
When I plugged in Cleary’s five most recent The Athlete Lifestyle posts into Pangram, all came back as 99.99 percent likely to have been written by AI. So, too, are his five most recent posts for the Buffalo Bills’ On SI blog, one of the other SI properties that I figured out is run by Pirrone. I only know as much because Pirrone said so on Twitter, where he also reposted a Cleary story that came up as 99.99 percent likely to be written by AI, according to Pangram.
Pangram separately found that Cleary's three most recent posts for the Los Angeles Chargers’ On SI site are 99.99 percent likely to have been written by AI, as is his most recent post for the Carolina Panthers' On SI site—which is hilariously complimentary of David Tepper, arguably the most hated owner in pro sports. Other, older On SI posts of Cleary’s have a noticeably different writing style; I plugged a few into Pangram, and it did not detect any AI writing.
I brought Pangram’s analysis of Cleary’s posts to Minute Media. Its senior director of strategic communications, Paige Graham, wrote back: “We take the use of AI very seriously. We remove content that we find does not meet our standards routinely and recently did another round of analysis which, as you would expect, could result in the removal of both content and corresponding reporters should those findings not meet Minute Media guidelines.”
Graham confirmed that Pirrone is not an employee of SI or Minute Media, but didn’t clarify which other On SI brands he oversees. On the subject of Matt Ryan, she conceded that his “daily story numbers are high,” but said that’s due to his “short, quick-turn pieces.” She added: “We can assure you that Minute Media does routine quality control checks on content, including for the use of AI, and Matt has come back clean in those checks.”
Minute Media’s AI assurances were given in mid-March. A haphazard selection of Cleary’s posts have since been deleted, with no editor’s notes or disclosures added to them. Most of Cleary’s posts are still up, as are many of his On SI profile pages. Matt Ryan’s faceless, bio-less profile page was recently updated to reflect his existence as a human being. Beyond that, I have no idea what to make of his prolific output, except that the best-case scenario here—he alone is publishing roughly 10 pieces a day, seven days per week, for eight straight months and counting—isn’t a great reflection of the paid-per-clicks model or, for that matter, the digital media space.
Kilty Cleary did not respond to requests for comment. Matt Ryan did not respond to a request for comment sent to his LinkedIn profile, nor did I hear back from an email address associated with his name that I found through public records. I did, however, hear from Pirrone when I reached out one more time in the days leading up to publication of this article. Pirrone told me that he, not Matthew Graham, is the publisher of The Athlete Lifestyle vertical, and Graham is The Athlete Lifestyle’s editor. Graham’s LinkedIn still lists him as “publisher” of The Athlete Lifestyle, which he oversees “along with partner Chris Pirrone”; I do not know what to make of that discrepancy. Given a chance to respond to a former staffer’s opinion that his tenure as an SI exec was viewed with “complete disdain,” Pirrone wrote, “I'm sorry that a former staffer feels this way. My goal is to always do what’s best for my colleagues and the organization.” He said he couldn’t comment on individual content creators, presumably referring to my questions about Cleary.
Prior to publication, I also sent Paige Graham some final questions about Cleary, and the company’s AI ethics policies. Graham asked to chat on the phone, and after exchanging pleasantries, she unexpectedly connected me with SI’s editor-in-chief, Steve Cannella, who began by letting me know that SI and Minute Media can’t comment on any individuals or personnel decisions. I told Cannella I was puzzled by why he was on the call and asked if he’s involved with On SI in any capacity.
"I do not directly oversee any of those On SI sites. So I guess the answer is no,” Cannella said. “On SI writers are not Sports Illustrated staffers. They do not report to me. But the On SI family of sites obviously has an intrinsic connection to the brand. So for that reason, we pay deep attention, and we are in contact with those publishers. We expect them to adhere to our AI code of ethics, things like that."
I told Cannella that if he didn’t have any oversight of On SI—and if he wasn’t in a position to comment on Cleary—then I was curious what he did want to talk about. Cannella asked to go off the record, so I have nothing else to report about our conversation. Paige Graham later sent me Minute Media’s “Editorial AI Code of Ethics” guide.
Cannella and Minute Media aside, I was interested in what the SI Union might have to say about Matt Ryan’s barrage of bylines, as well as Cleary’s possible use of AI—two downstream effects of an increasingly bleak sports media ecosystem. They sent over the following statement: “The SI Union fights for and upholds rigorous editorial standards... There should be a clear differentiation between [our] platforms and the On SI network, which we do not work for or have input into. Journalism with SI’s name on it should always meet the standards our audience has come to expect from us and be produced by humans, not AI.”
Despite their understandable protestations, it’s impossible for SI’s unionized journalists to fully untether from the blunders and embarrassing content produced by some of the On SI blogs. As unfair as that may be, it’s the inevitable consequence of Minute Media’s embrace of distracting and shameless content mills. If anything, Minute Media has further blurred the lines between SI’s various platforms. After all, it was Minute Media’s decision to rename FanNation as On SI, which has made the less reputable sports-blog network sound virtually indistinguishable from SI proper.
For all of the praise Minute Media has received over the last year, the inauspicious reality is that the company seems to consider “independent publishers” like Chris Pirrone to be worthy business partners. As long as that continues, you can expect thousands more stories from “digital monetization experts” whose deeply confounding syntax would make Shams Charania blush. And, apparently, many more horny posts with headlines like “Gracie Hunt’s mom Tavia slays Chiefs Christmas party fit sitting on Santa’s lap.”
