Pat McAfee is used to being at the center of attention, but not the kind of attention he has been getting lately. The outspoken ESPN personality has found himself facing questions over his reaction to student heckling, with the debate even catching the attention of Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough. Now, as the criticism continues to follow him, McAfee seems to be rethinking how much online criticism he wants to engage with.
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“I’ve been staying off of X,” McAfee said on The Pat McAfee Show. “Just been pretty mean on there, you know, and everybody’s calling me a snowflake and everything. It’s like, ‘Okay. F***. All right.’ I guess this is me being soft. A lot of X sports media people are chiming in. I appreciate that. I’m sure you’re very similar to the situation I’m in. It is very fun.”
The criticism hasn’t been limited to his reaction to the Utah incident. After going shirtless on air, he has also been criticized for turning the traditional College GameDay into an episode of his podcast.
What began as criticism from college football fans and fellow sports analysts has now snowballed into a much larger debate, drawing attention from political commentators and television personalities beyond the sports world. One of those was Political TV host Scarborough. On Election Day, he accused McAfee of damaging the College GameDay experience.
“I’ve just had enough of this Pat McAfee ruining College GameDay,” Scarborough asserted on MSNOW’s Morning Joe. “I look forward to waking up on Saturday mornings and watching that. And I don’t know if they haven’t got the message yet, but the manosphere that we all thought was brought in in ’24; it may get washed aside. Maybe you weren’t having to be [grunt noise] and yelling at people and being freaked out because two kids in Utah put up signs or said something that might offend you.”
Before the October 24 College GameDay broadcast in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah’s official social media account shared a video of students imitating McAfee. One called him ‘corny,’ and another called him ‘creepy.’ McAfee wasn’t just upset that students had made fun of him. He was mainly concerned that the university itself had shared the video through its official account.
He said he would have been fine with students posting it themselves, but he referenced the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah last year when explaining why the university’s post bothered him. However, McAfee ended up receiving widespread online mockery for comparing the two incidents. But after Scarborough brought the Utah incident into the political sphere when he criticized McAfee on Morning Joe, the ESPN analyst couldn’t stay silent.
During his Wednesday episode, McAfee also addressed being pulled into politics.
“I didn’t know if it was on every ballot or not,” McAfee said. “Did you hear they were voting to vote me off of GameDay yesterday? That’s a pretty big one. I think that particular show.”
“I’ve been kind of utilized in the political world. I did not know that was going to happen in my life,” he added. “I’ve just kind of pissed off all parties in that particular realm, and boy, I learned my lesson. I’m going to let that be a world that I am going to be dabbling away from in every particular world.”
Although McAfee still has a devoted audience, many others have grown weary of how he has acted, especially in response to the Utah incident and the backlash that followed. Staying quiet and letting the controversy fade seems like a sensible move for him.