Pat McAfee, one of ESPN’s sharpest talkers, is, it turns out, surprisingly soft-spoken.
The former Indianapolis Colts team member, who has also entered the ring to fight in the WWE, surprised many a grizzled sports media journalist in Bristol, Conn., on Wednesday by alternately lashing out at his critics (some of them in the room) and asked the audience to cut his freewheeling show, “The Pat McAfee Show,” a little slack.
“I understand that you may have many reasons to potentially hate me,” McAfee said while at the Disney-backed sports media giant’s headquarters on Wednesday. ‘I think they are misled. I would appreciate it if you would give me and my boys a chance. I think we will help sports media as a whole in the future. I think we will do some things wrong and for that we apologize.” Joining ESPN stars like Stephen A. Smith, Elle Duncan, Scott Van Pelt and Mike Greenberg, McAfee added, “We want to be good for the sport in sports media. We want to build sports. And we’d appreciate it if you gave us a fair chance.’
McAfee’s comments came just minutes after he threw a few verbal zingers at reporters from CNBC and The Athletic, who asked him about some decidedly non-traditional elements of his program. The discussion became so all-encompassing that a collection of an estimated fifty reporters at an event ESPN was holding to promote its services and programs to the media forgot to ask Stephen A. Smith about the status of his contract negotiations with the sports giant (His current deal expected to expire in July 2025),
It takes some time to understand why McAfee made his case. The host, who moved his three-hour “Pat McAfee Show” to various ESPN platforms in the fall of 2023, faced a slew of critics last January. He had allowed regular guest Aaron Rodgers to spread vaccine misinformation on camera and called out Norby Williamson, then an influential senior ESPN executive who ran many studio shows, on ESPN’s own broadcast.
In recent years, these types of actions were considered taboo – and not just at ESPN.
However, in 2024, traditional television will loosen up. A series of top MSNBC personalities lashed out at parent company NBCUniversal and NBC News in March over a decision to hire former Republican National Committee head Ronna McDaniel. In July, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” triumvirate of Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist scolded their corporate base for taking the show off the air following the assassination attempt earlier this summer on former President Donald Trump, fearing that opinion-based programming could cause offence. .
Such things are tolerated; Undoubtedly, younger journalism enthusiasts are partly turning to less formal sources of information. High-profile newsletters, meaningful Substacks and quirky Tik Tok videos and Instagram stories rely more heavily on personality and emotion than their TV and old-fashioned print counterparts. The TV tries to imitate the brutal tones.
That doesn’t mean McAfee has received an approval. He indicated Wednesday that he would likely bring Rodgers back to the show despite his past behavior — a decision that will likely open ESPN to new criticism. “I’ve heard some people say, ‘Why is he letting this man out? He doesn’t push back,” McAfee said Wednesday. Still, the caliber of Rodgers’ talent makes him an automatic newsmaker, and his comments, no matter how false, “will probably be used in every Aaron Rodgers documentary in 10 to 15 years,” McAfee said. “I don’t know if that’s journalism in your eyes or not, but I think it certainly did something useful for sports fans.”
McAfee’s colleagues didn’t say that outright, but they seemed to nod to a new era at ESPN, one in which they are allowed — and perhaps even encouraged — to express their opinions. Greenberg, who has been with ESPN since 1996, talked about a time when he worried that his decision to wear a green tie on camera could get him fired because it could reflect his love for the New York Jets. Now, the veteran host says, his job is to “reflect” what fans are talking about. When it comes to sports, this could be the result of a football or basketball match, but also the behavior of a player or the coach’s expressions off the field.
ESPN has not-so-quietly called on many of its top opinionators to join studio shows typically seen as the “stick-to-sports” variety. For example, Greenberg takes over as host of ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown.” Smith has participated in ‘NBA Countdown’ and McAfee has an active role in ‘College GameDay’.
McAfee appears to be figuring out how to navigate a show that has a rabid fan base that has grown around the series’ existence on YouTube and now needs to fit into the ESPN template. “For ESPN to make a fuss about something said on our show is not a good thing at all,” he told Wednesday’s audience.
And yet even ESPN’s top staff can see themselves as something more than just someone hired to report the basics of sports. “I consider myself more of an entertainer than a journalist,” says “Sports Center” host Elle Duncan, who also appears on some of the channel’s high-profile talk shows. After all, entertainers have more freedom to express their opinions than journalists.
