ESPN’s Pat McAfee has accused a longtime, high-ranking ESPN executive of sabotaging his YouTube show.
Speaking at the opening of the final hour of “The Pat McAfee Show” this Friday on YouTube, he pointed specifically to the executive senior vice president of studio and event production, Norby Williamson.
Listen:
Full clip of Pat McAfee accusing ESPN Head of Event and Studio Production Norby Williamson of “sabotage” pic.twitter.com/sMFpa0Qk7q
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 5, 2024
“There are folks actively trying to sabotage us from within ESPN,” he said. “More specifically, I believe Norby Williamson is the guy attempting to sabotage our program.”
“I’m not 100% sure, [but he] is just seemingly the only human that has information, and then somehow that information gets leaked and it’s wrong, and then it sets a narrative of what our show is. And then are we just going to combat that from a rat every single time?” he added.
The remarks were made a day after the New York Post ran a column in which contributor Andrew Marchand argued that McAfee’s allegedly poor ratings don’t justify his outlandish behavior and rhetoric.
“Since the inception of McAfee’s show on ESPN in the fall, Stephen A. Smith and ‘First Take’ are handing McAfee a 583,000 viewer lead-in, and McAfee is maintaining just 302,000, which is a 48 percent drop,” Marchand wrote.
“As compared to the same window last year, which featured ‘SportsCenter,’ McAfee is down 12 percent. On FS1, Colin Cowherd’s show has nearly beaten McAfee on some days and saw 19 percent growth from last year to average 156,000 viewers,” he added.
But how did Marchand know McAfee’s ratings, which weren’t officially released until Friday, a day after the column was published?
The @PatMcAfeeShow on ESPN platforms experienced a strong December with 298M total views across all platforms
LET’S GOOOOO ➡️ https://t.co/ntLypwrvCT pic.twitter.com/92VNIP6psO
— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) January 5, 2024
McAfee believes the answer lies in Williamson, whom he suspects leaked his ratings to Marchand to hurt him. His evidence is the fact that only CNN’s top executives would know the ratings beforehand.
“Somebody tried to get ahead of our actual ratings release with wrong numbers 12 hours beforehand,” McAfee continued on Friday. “That’s a sabotage attempt, and it’s been happening basically this entire season, some people who didn’t necessarily love the addition of The Pat McAfee Show to the ESPN family.”
He also claimed he and Williamson have “zero respect” for each other, in part because of a no-show that Williamson committed in 2018.
“That guy left me in his office for 45 minutes, no-showed me in 2018,” McAfee explained. “So that guy has had no respect for me, and in return same thing to him, for a long time.”
In concluding his remarks, the ESPN talking head said that despite the drama, his show is growing.
“So we’re very thankful,” he said. “I think we’re doing it right. We’re trying to do it as right as possible. We have good intentions every single time we come in here. We don’t always get it right, but motherf–kers been getting it wrong for a long time in this specific field. Long time.”
“We’re having a good time. We’re lucky to do this, obviously. Sports are amazing. They’re supposed to unify. If you look at our demo, I think we’re one of the most unified shows that’s ever been allowed on TV from political backgrounds, religion backgrounds. These ratings are stupid, who knows what they actually mean, but we’re thankful that a lot of people allegedly watch our show,” he added.
According to AwfulAnnouncing, “many” had previously warned McAfee about potential saboteurs like Williamson, including Dan Le Batard, formerly with ESPN:
Giant heartfelt congratulations to @PatMcAfeeShow. Don’t let anyone change you, Pat. Or how you dress. Or how you curse. Or how you succeed. Or how you do you. Or how you do your show. Youve done the hardest thing, your way. You’ve built a beast. Don’t let anyone tame it. — https://t.co/dweJk7oOCA
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) May 16, 2023
The tweet seen above was posted a month after Le Batard told Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina that he’d left the network because of “things shrinking” and him being too “confined.”
“There were things shrinking there, and we were being confined there in ways that were not comfortable to me,” he’d said. “There wasn’t enough freedom there. I’ve never negotiated money, I’ve never negotiated power. I’ve negotiated the freedom to do whatever I want, and so, by the end there, there wasn’t enough freedom.”
“But right before that, there was something involving moderation of a Joe Biden [event] in Miami with Florida Cubans that I wanted to do as a journalist, just as a moderator. There were any number of things that were gonna pop up politically that was gonna make it in some way or another probably if not untenable to me, then untenable to them because I wasn’t going to stay quiet over the last two years of what has happened in America just because for some reason somebody wanted me to talk about Francisco Lindor.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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