Pat McAfee was a polarizing figure on College GameDay last season, something that he admitted caused him to hesitate before confirming a return for the 2024 season . Although the tank top enthusiast and weekday ESPN host brought some much needed energy to the set, he also stirred up some controversy. One of those was his comments about Washington State in the midst of conference realignment that was part of a feud with former star quarterback Ryan Leaf.
And Leaf says it was his criticism of GameDay, McAfee, and Kirk Herbstreit that cost him work with ESPN.
Leaf talked about it all in an interview with OutKick’s Hot Mic with Jonathan Hutton and Chad Withrow that started off as a conversation around defending current ESPN personality Dan Orlovsky. The former Lions QB and First Take analyst ominously tweeted “Protect our daughters” at a time hysteria was running wild surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics that weirdly took on a life of its own .
In the midst of that conversation, OutKick hosts Chad Withrow and Jonathan Hutton talked with Leaf about his own run-ins with the best interests of ESPN, which brings us back to the Wazzu- GameDay feud from the 2023 college football season.
It all started with Leaf misunderstanding a Lee Corso one-liner over Washington State and Oregon State being teams that nobody wanted in conference realignment. Leaf took both to X (where he got called out by Herbstreit) and an NFL Network appearance on Good Morning Football , saying that College GameDay turned the harsh realities of conference realignment into a joke, especially for the programs left on the outside looking in.
McAfee then responded by calling out Leaf on GameDay where he dropped the hammer on the Cougars program, leading to backlash after many thought he went too far. After his public criticism of GameDay and eventually arguing with two of its biggest stars, Leaf says he got a call from a coordinating producer saying that he would be taken off of ESPN games for the rest of the season.
Ryan Leaf also had some fireballs to throw in McAfee and Herbstreit’s direction, calling them “overly sensitive” and “narcissists.”
“So, like, in my situation, the coordinating producer who and I had an incredible relationship with, came and said, ‘Hey, you know, I think we’re going to pull you off games the rest of the season.’ And I’m like, you know, you told me week in and week out, I’m your number one guy,” Leaf said.
“Herbstreit and McAfee are the most, you know, overly sensitive people I’ve ever met for guys who live in this high platform. They get criticized all the time, but boy, God, are they overly sensitive. Narcissists,” he added.
Leaf then talked about the conversation with producers that led to his untimely departure from calling games for ESPN and being sat down for the rest of the season.
“The coordinated producer calls me and I said, ‘well, you’re not making this decision. Who’s making this decision?’ He said, ‘Well, someone above my pay grade.’ And I said, ‘Well, you need to have someone above your pay grade call me.’ So they did and by that time I had confirmed people on why it happened. So when I got them on the phone, I was just like, yeah, I think this is about right. I think you and I, we don’t have shared values and so I think this is probably the proper decision. I get it, I get it. You got $85 million people scaring you, you got to fall in line. And so I understand that, on my end of things,” Leaf said.
Obviously, Ryan Leaf is presenting his side of the story here. And he’s been very vocal in going after media personalities elsewhere, like Jay Glazer .
According to the Awful Announcing weekly college football announcing schedules from 2023, Leaf worked the first four weeks of the season calling Big 12 Now games on ESPN+. His last appearance came in Week 4 on September 23rd calling the Sam Houston-Houston game. His first criticism of College GameDay came the following day on September 24th.
However, Leaf also worked similar schedules in past years calling Weeks 1, 2, 5, 10-11 in 2022 and 1-4, 12, and 13 in 2021. He hadn’t worked a weekly schedule for ESPN since 2019 and most of his work in recent years was on ESPN+, which features a number of syndicated or packaged games from around the country. So any connection between Leaf and ESPN by 2023 was loose at best and not anywhere near the recent layoffs of Robert Griffin III and Sam Ponder .
Given Leaf took some personal shots at Herbstreit and McAfee in addition to talking about his relationship with ESPN, it will be interesting to see if they or anyone else choose to respond as they did last fall.
The post Ryan Leaf claims ‘College GameDay’ criticism led to ESPN exit appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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