BARSTOOL LET HIM GO. INDIANA GOT HIM BACK: Young Mantis

Do you know this guy?

FISHERS, IN —After HE recently published an article examining Dave Portnoy’s long and sometimes complicated relationship with Indiana — from Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham to Notre Dame, Indiana University, the Indianapolis 500 and even Hoosier pizza — readers raised another question: Whatever happened to Indiana's own Young Mantis?

It was a good question.

Sometimes getting laid off turns out to be the beginning of the story.

Austin Taylor, better known across the internet as Young Mantis, started as an Indiana college student making offbeat sports videos, landed an internship with Pat McAfee’s former Barstool Heartland operation in Indianapolis, won Barstool Idol and eventually moved to New York to become part of the personality-driven media company built by Dave Portnoy.

Then Barstool laid him off.

Links to many classic Barstool videos where shared with the HE staff (worth a search).

Before New York, Mantis Tried to Become a Pro Basketball Player in Fort Wayne

One of Taylor’s most memorable early Barstool projects kept him firmly in Indiana.

Before Barstool permanently relocated him to New York, Taylor traveled to Fort Wayne and tried out for the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, then the NBA G League affiliate of the Indiana Pacers. Taylor discussed the experience during his 2026 Get IN. interview and described the Mad Ants tryout as one of the first significant pieces he produced after winning Barstool Idol.

The concept contained everything that would become familiar about Mantis content. Taylor walked into a legitimate professional basketball environment knowing that the entertainment value came as much from the improbability of the situation as from the basketball itself.

That willingness to enter places where he seemingly did not belong — and then see how long he could remain there — became one of his most effective comedic devices.

The Mad Ants experiment also demonstrated something that would become increasingly important later in Taylor’s career: beneath the comedy, Mantis actually loved basketball and could play.

WARNING, he can be crude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiNOAdD4WDs

Comments:

postman56•8y ago

this is the best video of the year!

CC

•8y ago

The ending got me with I Believe I Can Fly. Great video! What talent! Who edited this?

SaskatchewanSon69

•8y ago

Hahah I loved it. Can anyone explain to me the line about his grandmas pussy? I’ve never heard that before.

•8y ago

Died at “I used to drop 20 at LA fitness”

Stevocbk24

•8y ago

Unorthodox jumper, but he makes it work. This was fucking hilarious

pghsonj1325

•8y ago

4.8 balls - this had me dying.

Taylor returned to Indiana during the COVID era and began rebuilding his career from home. What followed may be even more remarkable than getting hired by Barstool in the first place. According to Taylor’s May 2026 appearance on Get IN. with Nate Spangle, the Fishers-based creator has now generated more than one billion video views across his content.

His unusual path has included trying out for a professional basketball team in Fort Wayne, attempting to substitute himself into a real Division I college basketball game, becoming an exceptionally accomplished free-throw shooter and eventually being invited back into the Barstool universe for one of the company’s biggest live-streaming events.

It is a very Indiana story about the changing media business — and about a creator who may have become more successful after losing the job that originally made him famous.

From IUPUI to Barstool Heartland

Taylor attended IUPUI and found his way into sports entertainment through an internship with Pat McAfee’s Barstool Heartland operation in Indianapolis. He has identified his early “Ref Daddy” video as one of the pieces that helped establish the strange, self-deprecating comedic style that would eventually define Young Mantis.

When the internship ended, Taylor did not immediately have a permanent Barstool position waiting for him. Instead, he continued creating his own videos and building an online identity around sports, comedy and a willingness to make himself part of the joke.

The breakthrough came in 2018 when Taylor competed in Barstool Idol, the company’s competition for aspiring personalities. He won, giving the Indiana creator a full-time opportunity inside one of America’s fastest-growing sports-media companies.

The Young Mantis nickname, originally connected to jokes about Taylor’s distinctive appearance and mannerisms, became his public identity. Suddenly, a student from Indianapolis was part of the Dave Portnoy media machine.

Barstool Took Mantis to New York

Taylor initially remained in Indianapolis after winning Barstool Idol, but Barstool eventually bought out his apartment lease and moved him to New York.

There, he spent roughly two years inside the company’s chaotic content operation, writing blogs, appearing in videos and participating in the sports and comedy projects that made Barstool different from traditional sports media. Barstool’s archives still contain numerous examples of Taylor’s work from that period, including sports commentary, comedy videos and pieces involving the Indianapolis Colts and Indiana sports.

Then came 2020. Entertainment can be a fickle industry. Just ask the people behind the scenes that hold the cameras, edit, and work as videographers for the performers.

During the economic disruption surrounding COVID, Taylor was laid off by Barstool and returned to Indiana. Publicly available accounts support describing his departure as a layoff rather than portraying it as some dramatic termination for misconduct.

Taylor has described the period after Barstool as considerably less glamorous than his New York media experience. Back in Indiana, he worked DoorDash, took freelance opportunities and tried to determine whether he could turn content creation into a sustainable independent career.

That turned out to be exactly what he did.

Building a Career Without Barstool

Taylor eventually partnered with Brandon Ames and began treating online content less like an audition for another media job and more like a business of its own. Brand partnerships, social-media strategy and short-form video increasingly became the focus.

Taylor’s experience reflects how dramatically the media industry has changed. A creator based in Fishers no longer needs a television studio in New York or Los Angeles to reach a national audience. A phone, a good idea and an understanding of social platforms can potentially generate an audience larger than many traditional television programs.

Taylor appears to have learned that lesson extraordinarily well.

His May 2026 Get IN. interview describes his work as having accumulated more than one billion views. Among his viral projects are “Shrek Beef,” basketball-related videos and a corn-dog video credited with approximately 130 million views.

Those numbers suggest that the former Barstool employee did not disappear when he left New York. He simply built a different distribution system.

The Night Mantis Tried to Check Himself Into an IUPUI Game

Perhaps no incident better captures the Young Mantis style than what happened at an IUPUI basketball game in December 2023.

Taylor arrived wearing a LeBron James Miami Heat jersey and, with less than two minutes remaining in IUPUI’s game against Lindenwood, approached the scorer’s table and attempted to substitute himself into the Division I basketball game.

For an improbable moment, it appeared the stunt might actually work.

It did not, but the resulting content circulated widely online and received national sports-media attention. Taylor later discussed the consequences, including being barred from IU-owned property and sporting events.

It was vintage Mantis. The joke was not simply telling viewers that he wanted to play Division I basketball. The joke was physically walking to the scorer’s table and seeing whether anybody would stop him.

Someone eventually did.

Mantis Can Actually Shoot and Ball Out

The basketball comedy eventually revealed something unexpected: Taylor had developed into an extremely capable free-throw shooter.

He began producing challenges centered on making large numbers of consecutive free throws, eventually documenting streaks of 100 straight makes and later 135 consecutive free throws.

That peculiar skill would ultimately reconnect him with the company that had laid him off.

In February 2024, Barstool and DraftKings staged a marathon free-throw challenge involving Barstool personalities attempting to complete a massive shooting goal while viewers followed along live. The event stretched for approximately 15 hours and became one of the company’s more memorable streaming experiments.

Barstool needed people who could make free throws.

Young Mantis suddenly looked like a valuable free agent.

Then Mantis Returns to Barstool — for One Day

Austin Taylor returned for the event on what he has described as essentially a one-day Barstool contract. Hilarious actually.

The circumstances made the appearance unusually compelling for longtime followers. The former Barstool Idol winner who had been laid off several years earlier was suddenly back inside the company, this time not as an intern or young personality trying to establish himself but as one of the shooters expected to help complete the challenge.

Mantis delivered.

One of the notable moments from the marathon showed Taylor and Dave Portnoy celebrating together after the challenge was finally completed. The scene immediately created speculation among Barstool fans about whether Mantis might return to the company permanently.

The possibility was not entirely imaginary.

On The Unnamed Show following the free-throw event, Portnoy discussed Taylor with Kirk Minihane and Ryan Whitney. Barstool’s own description of the episode noted that Portnoy left the door open for Mantis to return to Barstool. He should give him and his staffers some company stock in retrospect. Dave has been generous to many causes in the past, too many to list really.

A permanent reunion, however, does not appear to have followed, but Taylor has maintained a connection to the larger Barstool universe while continuing to operate as an independent Indiana-based creator.

Did Barstool Actually Do Mantis a Favor?

There is an interesting question at the center of Taylor’s career.

Would Young Mantis have accumulated a billion views if Barstool had never laid him off?

Nobody can know the answer.

Barstool unquestionably gave Taylor an enormous opportunity. It provided the platform that transformed an Indianapolis intern into a nationally recognizable internet personality. Portnoy’s company gave him an audience, experience and a crash course in how personality-driven digital media works.

But leaving Barstool forced Taylor to figure out something arguably more valuable: how to create an audience that belonged to him rather than to his employer.

He returned to Indiana, worked delivery jobs and freelance assignments, began working with brands and eventually built an independent content business capable of generating enormous audiences.

That makes his story about more than one funny internet personality.

It is also a story about where American media may be heading.

Indiana May Be the Perfect Place for the Next Generation of Creators

For decades, an ambitious young person interested in national sports media generally followed a predictable route: leave Indiana and move to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Taylor followed that route himself.

Indianapolis took him to Barstool. Barstool took him to New York. Losing Barstool brought him back to Indiana.

But the internet changed the geography of media while he was making that trip.

Today, Taylor can produce something from Fishers and potentially reach tens of millions of viewers without leaving Hamilton County. The success or failure of the content depends far less on his ZIP code than on whether people find it interesting enough to watch and share.

For Indiana, that matters.

The state does not merely produce athletes, coaches and sports fans. It can increasingly produce the people who tell the stories, build audiences around them and create new forms of entertainment without relocating to a traditional media capital.

Taylor’s career is one example.

He started as an intern in Indianapolis, won his way into Barstool, tried out for the Mad Ants in Fort Wayne, moved to New York, lost his job and came home.

Then he built something locally. Home is where the heart is, or is that just a Hallmark show?

More than a billion views later, Young Mantis is still creating, still playing basketball and still connected enough to his former employer that when Dave Portnoy needed a shooter, the guy Barstool once laid off received the call.

And when it came time to step to the free-throw line, the kid from Indiana was ready, despite his physical challenges.