HOW A NETWORK WRECKED RODGERS AND MCAFEE: BLAME BURKE MAGNUS
It’s hard to believe one sports program can take down a great quarterback and a media whiz-bang, but thanks to a horrid programmer, the daily two-hour farce has wasted Rodgers and destroyed ESPN
As a former history major at Holy Cross, Burke Magnus should bone up on the letter I once wrote him about couth. He was bringing Barstool Sports wackjobs to ESPN, which lasted briefly, and he ignored how one of his prime female hosts, Sam Ponder, was sick of being called “a slut” by Stoolies. Never mind, said Magnus. Something called “Barstool Van Talk” would carry on.
“As stated previously, we don’t control the content of Barstool Sports,” Magnus said. “We are doing a show with Big Cat and PFT.”
My email was ignored, disregarding my utter lack of interest in those names. For six years, Magnus has tried to destroy whatever magnitude the network once had in America. The hostility between an aggrieved Ponder and the gang-bangers carried on for months, meaning Magnus doesn’t care about professionalism and any effort to maintain the slaughterhouse of reduced ratings. It should surprise no one that he’s the mover and shaker behind the program that could kill the network, “The Pat McAfee Show,” and that as the No. 2 in-house player behind chairman Jimmy Pitaro, he might want to consider more brow-raising history.
No longer should Magnus promote the names of Stuart Scott, Chris Berman, Dan Patrick and other ESPN legends. Why lump stars with scum? Anyone associated with McAfee and his delusional alliance with Aaron Rodgers, who once and for all should be sued by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, might find another solar system and stop bothering us. It was Magnus who ceded to the former NFL punter and Hall of Fame quarterback, turning them into conspiracy memes and escaping the world of … athletics? I’ve already written the show represents the demise of compelling sports talk, with linear ratings that shame Disney Company — around 300,000 in a land of 335.8 million, leaving 335.5 million oblivious — while YouTube numbers do little to support the network’s presence. Now I’m urging CEO Bob Iger to show up and remove McAfee via his perpetual black tank-top, returning “SportsCenter” to the slot for dignity if not sanity.
Naturally, Rodgers returned to the same air Tuesday and didn’t make anything close to an apology, despite suggestions last week that Kimmel was a pedophile who might appear on lists linked to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This was Disney vs. Disney crime, if you will, with Rodgers on the sill for slander. And considering Kimmel is nowhere near such a creep sheet, I’d weigh suing Rodgers — and Iger — for what didn’t happen on the latest McAfee atrocity.
“I don’t have any apologies, not for that guy from ABC. Any type of name-calling is ridiculous and I’m not calling him (a pedophile), and neither should you,” said Rodgers, who was lying with a short memory. “Let me make that crystal clear. I don’t take any excitement or joy out of anybody doing that. Those are serious accusations meant for people who are on the list.
“And again, there were some names that came out recently from a deposition from 2005, but there’s still flight logs and a lot of other things that are going to come out. And this corruption goes deep, I believe, and most people that probably looked at it believe that it goes deep. But I’m not calling him one. No one should. Don’t do it in my name. That’s not cool. I’m not about that.”
Bloodheartedly, Kimmel disagrees. He opened his Monday show with a seven-minute massacre, calling Rodgers’ words “false and damaging” while saying, “Of course, my name wasn’t on (the Epstein list) and isn’t on it, and won’t ever be on it. I suggested that if Aaron wanted to make false and very damaging statements like that, we should do it in court so that he can share his proof with a judge.”
Then he said Rodgers is “too arrogant to know how ignorant he is,” adding with a comedian’s snark, “When you hear a guy who won a Super Bowl and did all the State Farm commercials say something like this, a lot of people believe it. A lot of delusional people honestly believe I am meeting up with Tom Hanks and Oprah at Shakey's once a week to eat pizza and drink the blood of children. And I know this because I hear from these people often, my wife hears from them. My kids hear from them. My poor mailman hears from these people. And now we’re hearing from lots more of them thanks to Aaron Rodgers.
“Saying someone is a pedophile is not an opinion. Nor is it trash talk. Sorry, Pat McAfee. And as far as the ‘Well, you say things about people all the time’ argument goes, yes, I do. It’s not the same. It’s not even close to the same. We say a lot of things on this show. We don’t make up lies. In fact, we have a team of people who work very hard to sift through facts and reputable sources before I make a joke, and that’s an important distinction — a joke about someone.”
Referring to him as “Karen Rodgers” and “hamster-brained,” Kimmel kept on pummeling. “I've spent years doing sports. I've seen guys like him before. Aaron Rodgers has a very high opinion of himself. Because he has success on the football field, he believes himself to be an extraordinary human being. He genuinely thinks that because God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he's smarter than everyone else,” he said. “The idea that his brain is just average is unfathomable to him. Aaron got two A’s on his report card and they were both in the word ‘Aaron.’ We learned during COVID that somehow he knows more about science than scientists. A guy who went to community college, then got into Cal on a football scholarship, and didn't graduate. Someone who never spent a minute studying the human body is an expert in the field of immunology.”
Replied Rodgers: “I think it’s impressive that a man who went to Arizona State and has 10 joke writers can read off the prompter. My education and JUCO and my three semesters at Cal, which I’m very proud of, has worked out for me and I’m glad to see it’s worked out for him as well. I wish him the best, but I don’t give a s–t what he says about me. As long as he understands what I actually said and I’m not accusing him for being on a list.’’
Not that Rodgers was finished. He had words for McAfee’s immediate boss, Mike Foss, who had referred to Rodgers’ comments as “a dumb and factually inaccurate joke.” This enabled him to take on superiors in the ESPN chamber, another shot at Magnus. “Mike, you’re not helping,” Rodgers said. “This is the game plan of the media. This is what they do. They try and cancel. It’s not just me. It’s nowhere near just me. You look at all the different people who have been censored from the internet, especially during Covid — the canceling that went on, the censorship, using the government to try and censor people — and if that doesn’t work, they go to name-calling.
“I mentioned all the names that I’ve been called, and they don’t stick, because I’m not anti-vax. I’m interested in informed consent, and things that are in the best interest of my body. I’m not a MAGA. I’ve never had any affiliation with anybody associated with that movement, which is OK if you are, though. There’s different opinions all over the place. If that’s your ideology, that’s fine. I’m not a super political person. Do whatever you want. Conspiracy theorist? That’s fine. Because if you’re looking at the track record of conspiracy theorists in the last few years, they’ve been right about a lot of things.”
Conspiracy theories? On ESPN?
And to think Rodgers, the other day, asserted the New York Jets must “flush the bulls--t” from their locker room and training complex. Meaning, troublemakers just go home. Um, isn’t he the biggest problem in this regard? Fix your Achilles tendon and return in July. Until then, shut up.
You turn on the program at noon Eastern time and see McAfee prancing around, surrounded by producers who’ve already been savaged by ESPN baseball insider Jeff Passan. You see another football geek, A.J. Hawk, rarely do anything but stare into the screen. You wonder why Pitaro and Magnus are devoting $85 million to this shlock for five years. They’ve laid off thousands of workers. They’re screaming that cable-cutting is trouncing them. Now they turn to McAfee, whose lowly numbers in two daily hours have nothing to do with Norby Williamson, the corporate boss he took down for leaking his ratings to the New York Post. No one is certain if Williamson was even the source, but that’s what McAfee does when the football team is down, attacking the wrong superiors when the only issue is the rat-head in the mirror.
Of all places for Magnus to be over the weekend, he shouldn’t have appeared in a photo with McAfee in Houston. This was a corporate man’s way of reminding he’s in charge of the crapper. In a comment to The Athletic, Magnus said of McAfee, “First of all, I think he’s supremely talented. He has tapped into the pulse of younger fans. … He has built a show from a blank piece of paper on his own. I think he took a lot of slings and arrows undeservedly in a lot of articles where people tried to draw a direct correlation between our workforce reductions and the acquisition of his show, which is insane. We acquired a show. We didn’t hire Pat as a talent and then build a show around him. He already built a show that is wildly successful in the YouTube environment and we’re bringing that show to ESPN.”
It is failing, prompting other shows to fail around him. I worked at that network for eight years, Monday through Friday, trying to posture “Around The Horn” as an afternoon player. McAfee has wrecked that show, too. I just wondered, unlike Pitaro and Iger, how Magnus entered the media business. He eventually went to a sport management program at the University of Massachusetts, where the curriculum included a course on how to butcher the “Worldwide Leader in Sports.”
Take a bow, Aaron Rodgers. Or is it just **ron, without the two A’s?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.