Pat McAfee shocked everybody this year when he decided to join ESPN, according to a report from Andrew Marchand of The New York Post.
McAfee’s show “is expected to remain on YouTube in some form, but one or two hours of it could be on ESPN, where the network would more likely be able to make the math of McAfee’s deal work,” Marchand wrote.
The deal, said by Marchand to be worth “more than eight figures,” will reportedly extricate McAfee from his previous four-year, $120 million contract with FanDuel.
The former Indianapolis Colts punter and two-time Pro Bowler continues to flourish in his post-football career.
Mike Greenberg, one of the company’s biggest and most senior stars, recently went one-on-one with the “Front Office Sports Today” podcast.
Greenberg once noted he was initially warned about letting McAfee on Get Up, considering the former NFL punter’s tendency to go “over the line.”
“When we first started putting (McAfee) on, I was warned by a lot of people, ‘Hey, Greeny, you got to be careful. You know, he sometimes goes over the line.’ And I thought, ‘Yes, but he strikes me as a person who’s smart enough to know where the line is. And he’ll go right to that line.’ He knows the line where he is, is very different from the line where I work and he’ll know not to go over it. And he killed it on our show. Am I proud of it? Yes, I’m delighted.”
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Greenberg gave interesting thoughts on McAfee joining the crew.
“I love it (and) I love McAfee,” he told Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports. “I had been hearing about him from people in the earliest days of ‘Get Up’ (but) I hadn’t seen much. Then I remember I was traveling back from the [2019] Draft in Nashville, and I saw him when he came out to announce (the Indianapolis Colts) pick. He turned legendary that day.
“I remember watching it and thinking, ‘This is different. Like there are a million loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed, smart-aleck talk show guys. There’s something very different about this one.’ There’s an obvious intelligence; almost genius. It was evident to me immediately, just watching that. And so I personally reached out to him that day. ”
McAfee was an All-American punter with the Mountaineers in 2008 and made the Pro Bowl with Indianapolis in 2014 and ’16.
His show has existed in some form or fashion since McAfee retired from football in 2016, bouncing from Barstool Sports to McAfee’s own company to various syndication deals.
