MCAFEE IS OFF TO A VERY BAD TIME AT ESPN, IF PITARO THINKS THE WORST
Moderate is the only take at a network that brought in two-thirds of a No. 1 NBA crew — and still hasn’t said who will be fronting “Monday Night Football” — but McAfee is free to get himself fired
All right, clod, this won’t work. Pat McAfee is trying to bring an online offensive about sexual abuser Larry Nassar, who should be ignored by ESPN until the day he dies, and he just will not stop. Will someone say his company hired Doris Burke and Doc Rivers to do two-thirds of the No. 1 NBA telecasts? That no one knows who’s doing the NFL’s pre-game show on Monday nights, possibly a man with no opinions, possibly a woman with few opinions?
That ESPN, 40 days from today, still has no idea what it’s doing?
But there was McAfee, thinking it’s quite OK that “I think Nassar was in on the design team actually.” What? He thinks it’s fine to mount an insensitive joke about an all-time sexually abusive coach of underage girls?
“There is an all-out onslaught against me right now for simply linking one terrible thing from a school with the most terrible thing from a school to a friend in a reply tweet. Talking sh— to a friend,” said McAfee, outlandishly. “And I do apologize if some people took that in a different way and then spun it in their own narrative to offend a bunch of other people and then kind of did that whole thing. I was simply talking sh— to my friend.”
First of all, what might McAfee add about a man who was sentenced 40 to 175 years in prison for 10 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct? He has nothing to add, but he continues anyway. “People were like, ‘You need to delete this and apologize.’ I’m like, ‘Uh, why?’ I’m talking sh— to my friend about something that definitely happened at his school … the way we decide to cover it is by talking sh— to somebody who loves everything about Michigan State because it’s his school,” he said. “If I went to Michigan State and this whole thing happened, if (my colleagues) didn’t say that to me, we would be avoiding something that is very serious, very terrible and very real.”
Fine, but Nassar’s guilty plea was almost six years ago. He has almost 34 years to go, probably 80, at which time he’ll be 139, definitely dead. There is nothing more to do but carry on with more topics. Not Pat.
“So I do apologize to everybody that just took my six-word tweet and then said that I was disrespecting this and not thinking about the victims,” he said. “It’s like, ‘What?’ I think we’re thinking about the victims, future victims, everything by reminding people that this motherf—— had a lot of power at Michigan State for a long time while being a terrible human being, and I’m just sh— talking a friend.”
McAfee does not have to continue at ESPN. They could yank him, pay him his $17 million (for one year) and tell him to get lost after one year. But if anyone thinks his nonsense can work, it’s starting to fade the other way at the wrong time. They can always fill the noon-3 p.m. time with another boring show, which will save Bob Iger all sorts of money. Why not try?
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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.