Pat McAfee was nearly a ‘SportsCenter’ anchor

Pat McAfee may have replaced the 12pm SportsCenter one year ago. But apparently, he nearly anchored ESPN’s flagship show last month.

SportsCenter’s Matt Barrie joined The Pat McAfee Show Friday afternoon amid ESPN’s apparent attempt at boosting the profile of some of its anchors . And as Barrie signed off, McAfee took note of the cast of Emmy awards on display behind him.

“ SportsCenter , right? I guess it just wins all the time,” McAfee said of the show’s propensity to win Emmys. And then McAfee dropped a surprising nugget.

“Remember when we almost got a chance to host SportsCenter ?” McAfee asked, drawing excitement at the flashback from his cast of contributors. “That was just a couple weeks ago whenever the update glitch was.”

Like many, ESPN was hampered by last month’s global Microsoft outage caused by a flawed update from the security firm CrowdStrike. Because of the outage, ESPN was unable to air its morning edition of SportsCenter on Friday July 19. Instead, ESPN aired the video simulcast of its Unsportsmanlike radio show. ESPN later replaced morning editions of SportsCenter on ESPN2 with simulcasts of Get Up and First Take before airing coverage of Formula 1.

The Pat McAfee Show was operating smoothly on ESPN from its Indianapolis studio that Friday. And by the time McAfee signed off ESPN at 2pm, the network was able to resume airing SportsCenter . But there was undoubtedly a period of time where ESPN wasn’t sure whether SportsCenter would be up and running by 2pm. Apparently McAfee was part of their contingency plan.

What isn’t clear is whether ESPN was just going to continue airing The Pat McAfee Show , or if he was going to attempt to anchor some form of SportsCenter from Indianapolis. Probably the former, but the latter would have undoubtedly rattled ex-ESPN executive Norby Williamson.

ESPN parted ways with Williamson earlier this year after four decades with the company, reportedly because he failed to align with the network’s vision. Part of that difference in vision was likely a disagreement over ESPN’s decision to make room for McAfee by bumping its noon edition of SportsCenter to ESPN2. Williamson sitting at home on a Friday afternoon in July and seeing McAfee anchoring SportsCenter would have been interesting.

[ The Pat McAfee Show ]

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