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As of early Friday afternoon, star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was expected to be back on “The Pat McAfee Show” next week, and an ESPN executive publicly stood by his bombastic and often controversial afternoon TV host after Rodgers appeared on The Pat McAfee Show this week show and suggested connections between Jimmy Kimmel and serial abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
“Aaron made a profoundly stupid and factually inaccurate joke about Jimmy Kimmel,” Mike Foss, ESPN senior VP of studio and digital production, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It should never have happened and we all agree on that point.”
Shortly after Foss spoke to The Post, McAfee returned to his daily show and promptly plunged the network into a new round of chaos by delivering a televised broadside against one of his bosses.
“There are people who are actively trying to sabotage us within ESPN,” McAfee said, singling out one of ESPN’s most senior executives. “More specifically, I believe Norby Williamson is the guy trying to sabotage our program.”
McAfee was apparently upset by a New York Post article on Thursday about declining linear TV ratings for his show, which premiered on ESPN this fall. Williamson is a long-time executive dating back to the 1980s, known for his long tenure at the station and his previous willingness to take on some outspoken talent, including Stuart Scott and Jemele Hill.
Foss spoke Friday afternoon about how ESPN and McAfee planned to move past the Kimmel incident and touted ESPN's confidence in McAfee to handle the fallout.
“Pat started a multi-billion dollar company, I don’t think he needs my advice on anything,” Foss said. “We definitely talked about this week’s shows and the shows after that. Ultimately, Pat makes his own decisions and I trust he will continue to take the right steps.”
Foss declined to comment on McAfee's segment about Williamson.
Williamson is now the second teammate of McAfee's to catch fire on his show this week. Kimmel is an ABC employee who, like ESPN, is part of the Disney umbrella. According to several people with knowledge of how Disney handled the Kimmel situation, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro reached out to Kimmel this week to smooth things over. (One person said Disney CEO Bob Iger did not mediate the discussions.)
Representatives for Kimmel and Rodgers did not respond to emails seeking comment. Williamson did not respond to a text message seeking comment.
ESPN devoted much of this week to national media attention on the issue, including segments on the “Today” show and on CNN with Jake Tapper, after Rodgers suggested during his weekly appearance on the McAfee Show that Kimmel did not provide a list of employees The station wanted the now deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be released. He seemed to suggest that Kimmel himself could be on the list, an escalation of a long-standing feud between the quarterback and the comedian.
Kimmel replied to X, formerly Twitter, and threatened to sue. The next day on his show, McAfee offered something resembling an apology, saying he understood Kimmel's anger but that Rodgers was all “talking s—.”
Some of Epstein's names were released in court documents this week; Kimmel was not among them.
McAfee's statement did little to quell the gasps and gasps from current ESPN alumni and employees, nor the speculation about Rodgers' future with McAfee.
“Jimmy Kimmel is probably your most famous Disney employee on the TV side,” said a former ESPN talent. “He’s been doing late-night appearances for 20 years. And they put someone on Disney TV and called him a pedophile. These are bananas.”
Even before Williamson's comments, there was a question circulating at ESPN's Bristol headquarters: Is McAfee and his $15 million annual salary worth it for ESPN?
Surely it's only getting louder now.
A certain amount of drama was to be expected when McAfee moved to ESPN this fall from a YouTube show he did for FanDuel. ESPN signed McAfee for all the money and five years for his more brotherly, casual style and, theoretically, to attract its younger viewers to the network. ESPN doesn't produce the show but licenses it from McAfee, which means less oversight than the other studio shows.
In the three months of the partnership, the culture clash between the tank-top-wearing YouTube star and the buttoned-up world of Mickey Mouse was harsh. McAfee has previously attacked ESPN executives and speculated wildly about an NFL coach's departure and a possible FBI raid. Rodgers, who McAfee has paid more than $1 million for his appearances over the years, has repeatedly expressed vaccine skepticism and antipathy toward Dr. Anthony S. Fauci expressed his fixation on Travis Kelce as an endorsement for Pfizer.
Foss declined to say whether Rodgers' continued participation was under review by either ESPN or McAfee.
“Pat has been at ESPN for three months,” he said. “The show has evolved dramatically, and the show will continue to evolve as the show's audience grows. We've had guests on the show in the last three months who have never been there before, and I expect all the people who come on the show will evolve as the show develops.”
What ESPN is getting from McAfee, in addition to these problems, is a Rorschach test for linear, digital and demographic analytics.
The New York Post found that McAfee's linear TV ratings are around 300,000 viewers, down 12 percent from SportsCenter during the same time period last year. Foss said that's an outdated way of thinking about viewership. He said McAfee achieved average daily viewership of more than 800,000 minutes across linear television, ESPN Plus, YouTube and TikTok in December, with viewers watching an average of nearly an hour per day. He said that audience is more than 85 percent 18- to 34-year-olds.
“It just can’t be that it wasn’t successful,” Foss said. “Mathematics is mathematics.”
He also emphasized that McAfee's true value – and the way all studio shows are valued – will change through streaming as ESPN offers a direct-to-consumer product in the coming years.
“I can understand that people who watch a TV number specifically would say Pat still has a long way to go, but we're not just interested in TV,” Foss said. “As it is a multi-platform acquisition, you have to look at everything in its entirety and also where the industry is going.
“Look at the relationship between McAfee, [Mike Greenberg] and Stephen A. [Smith]. This is collaboration [on each other’s shows], and these three are the key to our future,” he added. “When you move to direct-to-consumer, audiences can suddenly decide who they spend their time with. It is much more of a personality-driven industry than a brand-driven industry. Who do you want to spend more time with than the three most important voices in sports?”