Scott Van Pelt gets brutally honest about Pat McAfee

Pat McAfee wasn’t shy about recently confronting reporters at ESPN’s Media Day.

While Stephen A. Smith, who was also on the panel with him, along with Mike Greenberg, Elle Duncan and Scott Van Pelt, has since defended his actions , McAfee was quick to confront those he feels have provided unfair coverage of him and his The Pat McAfee Show.

To recap , McAfee challenged CNBC’s Alex Sherman’s definition of journalistic standards; he called out The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and even came after Awful Announcing. Here’s a sample of those quotes via Daniel Kaplan, who was on-site for AA in Bristol.

“You can certainly paint me and my guys as terrible people. And I think that was happening for a lot of people as they were getting a lot of clicks,” said McAfee. “I mean, Awful Announcing is in here somewhere. I don’t know who you are, but like, man, future earnings with, like slander, libel, character assassination, stolen clips, all that shit. Like, if I wanted to ever deal with suits, which I don’t, and everybody knows that that could be a thing, like I can make that all the thing.”

While Van Pelt isn’t the first fellow panel member to weigh in on McAfee’s confrontation with reporters, he is the first one to be directly asked about it. Smith got out in front of it, as he generally weighs in on every topic related to sports media or ESPN on his The Stephen A. Smith Show , but as for Van Pelt, he was asked about it by Jimmy Traina on the SI Media Podcast .

“We had never met in person, and so, we spoke prior to,” Van Pelt said. “And he was curious about what this was going to be like, and I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s a chance for people to ask us questions. It’s a chance for people to ask us about what we’re doing, and we’ll see.’ And so, I think about the thing of Pat and his show is it reminds me a lot of what (Ryen) Russillo and I had back in the day on radio in this sense; that was Ryen, myself, Stanford Steve… what I mean is that it was a group of guys and gals that were part of our show — it was a show unit. We weren’t an outlaw show, but we clearly weren’t a show that the exces. got. They never understood what we were. But we knew that the people out there got us.

“And so, we didn’t give a sh*t if the suits got us or not; we were going to do our show. Still, to this day, there are people that have nostalgia for that show, so I relate to the idea that it’s us against the powers that be… It is Pat’s show, and it’s run on our network. That’s an interesting difference than a show that is on ESPN, and Pat clearly wants…you out there to understand that. ‘This is our show. They just run it on ESPN.’ The question was about journalistic standards, and so to ask Pat and their show to do the same show that Bob Ley would do on Outside the Lines is not what it is.

“Bob doing Outside the Lines , and Bob’s one of the all-time greats and a dear friend who I admire and appreciate, but Bob knows that my version of SportsCenter is not the one that he did. For Christ’s sake, Jimmy, we’re a sportsbook; ESPN’s a book. The world’s different. I’ll say this: I understood the question because they’re asking, ‘Should you be doing that?’ But I understand Pat’s reaction. Because he’s like, ‘Look, man, we do our show; they run it on ESPN.’ And I want to make this clear: Pat’s my teammate, and I got his back, and I appreciate him and his guys and how they do what they do.

“Expecting the same type of sort of act or approach, I should say, from that show as you would from Jeremy Schaap or something, I just think it’s not the same. They’re not the same. I think what you saw in the group that was up there, is it’s sort of a bit of a buffet what we’ve got. In the morning you’ve got Stephen A., who follows Greeny, who goes into Pat. That’s a big part of what TV has become — daytime TV. And then, you got me late night, Elle and Kevin Negandhi primarily before the games, we’re usually afterwards. I think it was a way for us to say, ‘Here is the buffet; this is what we got.’ The beauty of the buffet, I suppose, is that’s not for you, go to next thing in the buffet… It’s not all the same. That’s the other part of the buffet, there’s something that’s different for everybody.”

Van Pelt went on to say that he doesn’t know McAfee well enough to speak for him, nor would he. He established that McAfee is his own man, who is very clearly going to speak for himself, and he’s going to do his show how he wants to do his show.

“They’re not gonna be sort of pushed into a direction that they don’t want to do,” Van Pelt continued. “And I think he was also clear about being reflective about stuff that he thinks gets wrong, and he said as much. I talked to him afterward just about, in general, I can remember vividly being a guy in my early 40s with Russillo and wanting to fight the law. At some point, that energy is wasted because, ultimately, you know what you’re doing, and you know the way that you’re gonna do it.

“I think as long as people are fair…His point, and he said it that day, is that he just doesn’t want the way he’s covered to impact someone who hasn’t seen him from giving his show a chance. I don’t know, man, he’s my teammate and I got his back.”

[ SI Media Pod with Jimmy Traina ]

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