ESPN once devoted more than five consecutive hours of prime-time programming to diversity, inclusion, and intersectionality.
The network became so woke that it went from being the most trusted name in sports to pulling a broadcaster off the air for having a name that sounded racist.
‘We’re watching.’
That’s a true story.
A network’s nadir
In 2017, a part-time sportscaster was set to announce the William & Mary-Virginia football game at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Virginia. The only problem was his name was Robert Lee, and that was too close to Confederate General Robert E. Lee for ESPN, even though Lee is Asian.
The broadcaster was reassigned to cover a different game that day.
Still, the ESPN snowball was nowhere near critical mass. The next month, ESPN reporter Jemele Hill called President Trump a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] white supremacists.”
When the George Floyd era came around, it ushered in unquantifiable amounts of diversity programming at the network, culminating in the “Time for Change” broadcast that time certainly forgot. From 8 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on June 24, 2020, ESPN aired segments with Black Lives Matters founders, essays about “white privilege,” and race-based poetry readings.
In an effort to clear-cut any nonbelievers, the network pulled hosts Rachel Nichols and Sage Steele off the air in 2021 for daring to raise questions over topics like diversity and vaccines. In 2022, ESPN took a side in the transgender-athlete debate and celebrated Lia Thomas for beating women in swimming.
By 2023, ESPN seemed primed to bottom out, never to regain the respect of men who flicked it on after work or boys who watch “SportsCenter” on repeat during a sick day.
As the network took leaps to becoming a laughingstock, it seemingly had no choice but to force a pendulum swing. So its leaders turned to none other than a former NFL punter who retired young and had been making waves.
Pat McAfee embodied the opposite of what ESPN preached for years: an offbeat, edgy, small-town personality with the right amount of charm. Most of all, he was doing big numbers, and that’s exactly what the network needed.
With millions of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of live viewers, ESPN pulled up to McAfee’s house with a dump truck full of money: $85 million over five years, to be exact.
A contract that big may tighten the intellectual belt for some, but not McAfee. He wasted no time pushing the envelope.
Before his new show even aired, he was making jokes about sex offenders.
Lauren Leigh Bacho/Getty Images
Paging ‘Mr. Pfizer’
“I think Nassar was in on the design team actually,” McAfee said in response to some college football uniforms. Larry Nassar was convicted of sex crimes against young female athletes on the USA Gymnastics team.
Why comment on the tautness of a team’s pants? Why not? Reset.
McAfee’s show aired in September 2023 and got off to a blazing start. But it didn’t take long for friend of the show and NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers to start making his weekly appearances, something he had done since 2020.
That marked the end of McAfee’s tenure as a noncontroversial host, just a month into his new ESPN show.
The quarterback dropped back and threw a bomb on ESPN airwaves, calling fellow NFL player Travis Kelce “Mr. Pfizer” for promoting a COVID-19 vaccine.
Rodgers wasn’t pulled off the air, censored, or reprimanded by McAfee; the host let him go off. In fact, he let him go off for months as he criticized the NFL and the federal government, while acting as Rodgers’ sounding board in his years-long feud with TV host Jimmy Kimmel.
McAfee endured constant criticisms at the time. Chief among them were claims that ESPN had wasted its money on him and his contract was tantamount to spending almost $100 million to platform conspiracy theories.
This didn’t stop the podcaster. McAfee turned a negative into a positive and became the go-to source for mainstream controversial content in the sports world, whether he liked it or not.
RELATED: Joe Rogan & Shane Gillis say we’re never going back — and young men should listen
Working out
When McAfee was told his success as an informal presenter was based on him being white, he didn’t let the accusations paint him into a corner. In fact, he broke the wall down of what he was allowed to say.
“There’s one white bitch for the Indiana team who is a superstar,” McAfee said, ironically as an ESPN disclaimer scrolled by at the bottom of the screen.
McAfee explained that he was actually praising WNBA star Caitlin Clark, but that didn’t matter; the media wanted a scalp. The former player apologized, said what he meant, and moved on. They were expecting a collapse, but when the pressure mounted, McAfee refused to fold.
When LeBron James and Stephen A. Smith nearly came to blows, McAfee hosted James in a way no other outlet would. He didn’t ask for an apology or a prepared statement; he simply said, “We’re watching.”
Indeed McAfee and company watched when James likened Smith to Taylor Swift. They listened to James describe Smith as eating ice cream in his “tighty-whities” at home. The most popular NBA player in a generation was trash-talking with the boys, and it was airing on ESPN. No network apology-broadcast followed.
The formula hasn’t changed, either. Rolling through 2026, McAfee is still having Rodgers on to trash Anthony Fauci and reprimand his haters, but he does so in front of live college football audience.
No matter how many people call McAfee a conspiracy-theory pusher or a “threat” to journalism, he has persevered, using a philosophy he only recently published: “If I seen young me, what would I tell him now? Just breathe; it’ll all work out. Somehow it’ll all work out.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Podcast, Pat mcafee, Espn, Lebron james, Stephen a. smith, Caitlin clark, Entertainment, Sports
