It was all shaping up to be a golden year for Pat McAfee. The man who landed a five-year, $85m deal in 2023 to take The Pat McAfee Show to ESPN had cemented himself as the star attraction of the sports broadcaster’s bold new era of stunts, stupidity and memebrain swill. His persistently honking presence on the set of ESPN’s College GameDay had helped push ratings to new heights. ESPN executives were so impressed with McAfee they were reportedly in negotiations to award him a new contract worth between $60m and $65m a year; one even went so far as to describe him as a “generational” media talent.
Then, over the weekend, disaster struck. A handful of college kids attacked him online ahead of his appearance with College GameDay at the University of Utah. Well, “attacked” is maybe overstating things: they made a few mild jokes at his expense. But it was all too much for ESPN’s brightest blimp. Suddenly, McAfee’s world came crashing down. His initial reaction, to be fair, was mild: “The university’s Instagram account posted something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love,” he said ahead of the Utes’ clash with the Houston Cougars last week.
But by Monday the narrative had changed. On his eponymous show, McAfee said he had “never felt more uncomfortable” than he did on the Utah campus, alluding to the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a reason for his unease: “I thought to myself: Has anything really scary happened at, like, a college gathering in the state of Utah recently? Do you think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university? I don’t know.”
Well, Pat, neither do I. To read this comically melodramatic retelling of his time at Utah you might assume last week’s College GameDay was uncommonly vicious and antagonistic. Instead, it was the usual chop-up of hype, half-assed technical analysis and shouting, in which McAfee supplied his standard mix of meandering rants and basic crowd work and the gathered masses, in turn, responded with cheers and (good-natured) boos as expected. The video that McAfee implied had him fearing for his life, posted to the university’s Instagram and TikTok accounts, involved a handful of students poking very light fun at the ESPN host for ripping off his shirt on set (which he does often) and spouting “corny” lines in place of real analysis (ditto); one of McAfee’s would-be assassins even emphasized that “we love you bro” as he implored McAfee to “keep the shirt on”.
The wokes and the leftists are always the most precious snowflakes on earth until some kid does a mild impersonation of Pat McAfee ripping his top open; when that happens it’s a federal emergency and the national guard needs to be called in to set things right. Any more of this mild banter from the brutes and ingrates of the American undergraduate population and McAfee will be calling his buddy Donald Trump to request Secret Service protection.
Even more bizarre than McAfee’s amazingly thin-skinned overreaction to this absolute non-event is how seriously his claims of imminent danger to his life (stemming, once again, from a video in which a few students say they don’t want to see McAfee’s naked torso) have been taken by those around him. The school published a groveling apology for its actions and deleted the offending video from its social media channels, while ESPN issued a statement of support for McAfee and “the very real and valid concerns he has around safety and security”.
During his ascent at ESPN, McAfee has perfected all the attributes of a WWE-style heel – the gift for offense, the shirtlessness, the penchant for writhing on the ground like an upturned beetle – with the exception of one: he absolutely cannot stand it when he’s the butt of the joke. The man is a machine at whipping a crowd into a hostile frenzy then runs in fright the moment the first boos hit his ears. McAfee is perhaps the leading light of the rightwing sports bros who’ve come to prominence in the age of Trump: these men love sports, love their country, love their president, and are unsure what to make of women. Trump himself made his debut appearance on The Pat McAfee Show late last year, and over this summer McAfee was on hand to lend some primetime meat to the inaugural Patriot Games, the president’s Hitlerian exercise in uplift for the white youth of America.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that McAfee has absorbed completely the personality traits of the president: to the casual misogyny, the constant moaning about “woke”, the boorishness and the egomania can now be added McAfee’s Trumpian inability to take a joke or any kind of criticism, however mild or well-intentioned; in the deranged McAfee worldview it now seems even college kids, a big part of College GameDay’s own audience, are part of the shadowy network of villainy working to bring ESPN’s star beetroot down. Whether it’s punching across at critical media outlets or punching down at fans who don’t like the kind of shirt-ripping frattiness he’s introduced to College GameDay, McAfee never seems more engaged in his work than when snarling about the “rats”, “marks”, “losers” and “puppets” snapping at his feet.
It cannot be emphasized too much how stupid and overblown this whole concocted controversy is. What is really going on here? Is this all reflective of a desire for attention on McAfee’s part, another demonstration of his continuous need to make everything – in sport, on TV, in culture at large – About Him? Or is ESPN so heavily degraded and virality-brained now, so in thrall to the Magaverse and its perverse understanding of the world, that the empty suits who run the place genuinely feel the operation will collapse without a happy McAfee – placated and kept safe from the everyday terrorists roving the college campuses of America – at its core?
Perhaps it’s a bit of both. As Soft Pat’s star at ESPN has risen and he’s been handed more prestigious on-air assignments, the statements emanating from the C-suite hailing his “generational” and otherworldly talent have become more and more ludicrous; amid reports of his monster new contract, McAfee is now involved in Monday Night Football and there’s talk of potentially using his Super Bowl alt-cast for even higher honors on screen.
“Pat can do whatever he wants,” ESPN executive vice-president Mike Foss recently mused, and there’s a real sense that the whole network is under the spell of McAfee’s bare breast, that – if only as a cultural project – the erstwhile “Worldwide Leader in Sports” now belongs to McAfee. The wholesale enrollment of a once-proud network into the cult of McAfee does not reflect the man’s talent: he’s good for ratings, sure, but any old rightwing purplehead could curl up into a topless ball, screeching, and do what he does. Instead, it’s a sign of the profound confusion that has gripped traditional media in the post-cordcutting era of vertical video and endless slop. Nothing else works, seems to be the thinking; maybe this idiot will.
In another context, or another era, the TV triumph of the outcast, the oddball, the unlikely star might have heralded a deepening of the culture, a growing sophistication in our collective understanding of what it takes to be appealing as a popular media talent. But so much of what McAfee represents is the kind of meatheaded insensitivity that sports broadcasting – with its polish and professionalism – was historically designed to supersede, especially at a place like ESPN. Figures like McAfee drag us all back into the frathouse, the kegger, the swamp, and now they won’t even let us joke about it.
