Aaron Rodgers Appearances With Pat McAfee Highlight ESPN’s Awkward Position

As New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ lengthy non-apology to Jimmy Kimmel started to wind toward its conclusion nearly half an hour into his appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday, Rodgers opined that he didn’t feel like the ESPN executives upset about the situation heard what he actually said.

“I don’t think Mike Foss watched the clip,” Rodgers said indignantly.

Rodgers was referring to ESPN’s senior vice president, who told Front Office Sports the week prior that Rodgers made a “dumb and factually incorrect joke” about Kimmel when Rodgers said Kimmel was hoping sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s client list wouldn’t come out (Rodgers clarified his comments Tuesday, saying that he thought Kimmel wouldn’t want to be proven wrong that a client list exists, not that Kimmel himself was on the list).

McAfee, whose efforts to move the conversation into safer waters were not going swimmingly, covered his eyes and started laughing. On the split screen with McAfee and Rodgers, former Green Bay Packers linebacker A.J. Hawks broke into a smile, then assumed a quizzical look.

“What part of his quote did you not like, Aaron?” Hawk asked. “What part of it did you not enjoy?”

“A.J.,” someone on the broadcast muttered into his mic.

“‘Made a dumb and factually incorrect joke,'” Rodgers quoted. There was a brief pause as everyone on the show digested this.

“You thought it was a pretty smart, good one,” McAfee said with a hint of a smile.

That exchange encapsulated much of what has happened over the last few weeks on McAfee’s show as conversations with Rodgers have veered into uncharted territory.

With ESPN’s enormous reach, and on a show where he won’t be “censored” or “canceled,” Rodgers offers unfiltered thoughts about Epstein, Joe Biden, COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and even ESPN executives and stars on its parent network, ABC.

McAfee manages to tie everything together through the singular sense of comedic timing that has elevated him into one of sports media’s most popular figures.

Still, charisma aside, McAfee—who is in the first year of a five-year deal worth $85 million—has not made life simple for ESPN. The New York Post’s Andrew Marchand wrote last week about McAfee’s less-than-impressive numbers on air so far.

In response, McAfee accused ESPN executive Norby Williamson of trying to sabotage his show, calling him a “rat” (for his part, Marchand wrote that McAfee was “somehow reasoning [Williamson] was the only one in the world with the ratings information”).

ESPN’s response to McAfee: “No one is more committed to and invested in ESPN’s success than Norby Williamson. At the same time, we are thrilled with the multi-platform success that we have seen from The Pat McAfee Show across ESPN. We will handle this matter internally and have no further comment.”

McAfee’s television ratings won’t decide the success or failure of his show on ESPN—not when he has 1.3 million TikTok followers and 2.4 million YouTube subscribers consuming his content. ESPN knows how valuable those metrics are, even when the owner of the platforms takes a “flamethrower” to the network, as former ESPN employee Jemele Hill put it to fellow former ESPN employee Dan Le Batard.

“This is something you just never see, especially at a place like ESPN where there is sort of an unofficial cardinal rule about talent-on-talent crime or letting what is happening in the building spill out into public arenas in the way that Pat McAfee did,” Hill said on The Dan Le Batard Show.

And, of course, the entire situation is complicated by the Rodgers drama. In his statement to Front Office Sports, Foss said that McAfee’s show “will continue to evolve” and he wouldn’t be surprised “if Aaron’s role evolves with it.”

That was not enough to placate Rodgers (who “for sure” has earned more than $1 million appearing on McAfee’s show, McAfee told the New York Post).

“I don’t work for you, Mike,” Rodgers said on Tuesday.

Newsweek reached out to ESPN as well as Rodgers’ representation via email for comment.

Therein lies the problem for ESPN. Rodgers doesn’t work for them. McAfee is an employee, but his production of The Pat McAfee Show is contract work for the network, and his platforms give him an enormous amount of leverage.

McAfee’s fans don’t seem to be looking for buttoned-up television personalities citing figures.

“Love your show fellas, don’t ever change,” one user wrote in a well-liked comment on the YouTube clip of Rodgers’ appearance. “This is why we love this show. No matter what side of the aisle you’re on we can all come together and just be honest with each other and have a good time,” another commenter wrote.

McAfee’s fans want to hear about sports, but they also want to giggle and smirk along with McAfee and Hawk when Rodgers insults McAfee’s bosses.

What they really seem to want—whether from the show’s panelists or from its high-profile guests—is the vibe McAfee provides: A free-flowing conversation about sports that branches into other arenas while also breaking down the fourth wall of a giant media apparatus and exposing all of the inner workings.

That exposure has made executives who previously operated behind the scenes into the public eye. If ESPN is committed to The Pat McAfee Show it remains to be seen whether anything can be done about it.