Pat McAfee Confronts Sports Media Reporters Directly in Stunning Rant at ESPN Media Day: ‘You Made a Lot of My Life Hell’

Cecil Copeland/AP

Pat McAfee on Wednesday called out multiple members of the media by name and accused them of mischaracterizing both him and his show.

McAfee participated in a panel with Scott Van Pelt , Stephen A. Smith , Elle Duncan , and Mike Greenberg during ESPN’s annual media day. According to a report from Awful Announcing , the discussion took a sudden turn when CNBC’s Alex Sherman asked a question about “journalistic standards.”

McAfee took exception to it.

“Sports media has never been wrong before?” McAfee responded. “Did we have doctors on set during all of Covid on ESPN? How did that all go? So whenever you talk about these journalistic standards, was that at journalism school… we break news I think every other day on our show that would be nowhere else. Is that journalism, getting people to open up and chit-chat and talk and expand about who they are, is that journalism, interviewing people that never talked anywhere? Is that journalism?”

Later, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchard asked McAfee to elaborate on what he thinks are the biggest mischaracterizations of him. In his answer, McAfee claimed Marchand was part of the reason for it.

“Because you made a lot of my life hell for a bit with the things that you reported, how you were reporting, what you were saying, and your source at the time was kept out of the conversation for purpose because of everything that you were kind of going to do,” McAfee told Marchand. “So I just think an image was painted of me through a lot of different mischaracterizations and misrepresentations of what our show is… And sometimes we might be the worst people on TV, and we’re going to try not to be that going forward.”

McAfee even singled out Awful Announcing , claiming the outlet mischaracterizes and misuses footage of The Pat McAfee Show . He seemingly hinted at contemplating legal action.

“I mean, Awful Announcing is in here somewhere,” he said. “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.”