Things are getting messy over at the worldwide leader in sports, as ESPN and Pat McAfee continue to butt heads.
The Pat McAfee Show has been in headlines all week after Aaron Rodgers’ regular Tuesday guest spot got controversial.
The New York Jets quarterback suggested that late night host Jimmy Kimmel would be on the Jeffrey Epstein client list when it came out, which obviously didn’t go over well (especially with Kimmel).
McAfee did his best to walk back some of the controversy the day after everything blew up, and the whole debacle even led Fox Sports analyst Nick Wright to call the New York Jets QB a “malignant, dangerous force.”
And on today’s installment of The Pat McAfee Show, which may I remind you ESPN just recently signed to a 4-year, multi-million dollar deal, the charismatic show host decided to rip into the some people that work for the company that hired him on just last year.
McAfee stated:
“We understand that more people are watching this show than ever before. We’re very thankful for the ESPN folks being very hospitable.
Now, there are some people actively trying to sabotage us from within ESPN.
More specifically, I believe Norby Williamson is the guy who is attempting to sabotage our program. I’m not 100 percent sure, that is just seemingly the only human that has information.
And then somehow that information gets leaked, and it’s wrong. And then it sets a narrative of what our show is. And then, are we just going to combat that from a rat every single time? I don’t know.”
Wow, calling out someone by name will certainly cause some problems.
Norby Williamson is the Executive Senior Vice President of Studio and Event Production for ESPN, and has spent the better part of the last 50 years with ESPN, also serving as an executive editor.
Williamson is over a lot of things at ESPN, including Pat McAfee, so for Pat to call him out is either very brave or very stupid, depending on the lens you look at it through.
McAfee continued with his nearly two minute rant, saying:
“But like, somebody tried to get ahead of our actual ratings release with wrong numbers 12 hours beforehand. That’s a sabotage attempt.
And it’s been happening basically, this entire season from some people who didn’t necessarily love the ol’ addition of the Pat McAfee show to the ESPN family.
There’s a lot of those. We’ve heard them anonymously quoted in The Washington Post, in the New York Post in the New York Times, in the LA Times, in Wall Street Journal. And they’re never like ‘yeah, love the show’ It’s always like little things to try to tear us down.”
Pat McAfee had formerly aired his show on YouTube and was working underneath the umbrella of FanDuel before he and his show took a pay cut to move over to ESPN. With fiery comments like this, it could be safe to say that both McAfee and ESPN are reconsidering that agreement.
Even though Pat tore into some people and specifics of ESPN, he tried to land his accusatory monologue on a more positive note:
“So even with that taking place in potential, like there’s we’re still growing somehow. So we’re very thankful. Yeah, I think we’re doing it right. We’re trying to do it as right as possible.
We have good intentions every single time we come in here. We don’t always get it right. But (that) motherf***er has been getting (it) wrong for a long time in this specific field. Long time.”
Well, that last part wasn’t all that positive…
You can view the video of Pat McAfee calling out the ESPN (his employer) below:
