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Whenever I’d cast focus groups for the coveted demographic sliver of 15-29 year olds that advertisers feverishly believe is where lifelong consumer behaviors are established some of the executives who claimed to know that age group better than me–often because they were parents and/or siblings of them and somehow thought their one-person laboratory was somehow representative–they would actually ask what we were planning to serve them for their meal to keep them focused and their opinions valuable. Since we rarely paid respondents top-tier participation rates–or maybe because the execs were rightly concerned that our shows weren’t that compelling–they might have had a point.
Fortunately, my colleague who at this point had decades of experience working with teens and young adults was respected enough to reassure them that it wasn’t as big a deal as they may have been fearing. “Just feed them pizza”, she advised. “No one ever gets sick of pizza”.
A couple of years later while watching the respondents settling in waiting for her to begin the inquisition we overheard a few griping about the food. “Don’t these people realize we ALWAYS eat pizza? Couldn’t they have least sprung for something healthier?” Sure, millennials tend to be an entitled group, but they did have a point. Those groups did not go particularly well. And for the rest of time that we worked together we switched to half-subs and salads.
I dredge up this long-ago minutiae in the wake of the latest cause celebre involving Pat McAfee, arguably the Joe Rogan of sports media. At least, that’s what ESPN executives seem to want us to think. Over the past weekend FOR THE WIN’s Jeff Smith recapped where he is now and where he may very well be in a matter of weeks:
The former NFL player-turned-media personality is known for creating The Pat McAfee Show and running with it, which began when he hosted it at Barstool Sports; since then, he’s become a juggernaut and a focal point of ESPN’s coverage. McAfee has appeared on everything from Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football to College GameDay and various shows before The Pat McAfee Show moved to ESPN in 2023. While McAfee has become a staple at ESPN, the former Indianapolis Colts punter’s role with the company is reportedly expanding even more. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reported that, in addition to becoming a panelist on ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown, McAfee would also host an alternate telecast on weeks when Peyton and Eli Manning’s alt-cast isn’t on.
Whenever the subject of McAfee comes up, the network wll point to data that it claims justifies this ubiquitousness. They cited his outsized online success as a key reason while they had failed with numerous previous linear-only attempts to program middays before they worked out a shared-space deal that brought some of his minions into their tent. And they seem to believe that he’s the key driver behind a resurgence in College GameDay’s numbers that toggled between 28-37% in comparisons between 2025 and 2024–a particularly significant win in the wake of aggressive competition from FOX’s efforts ahead of its typically more highly viewed Big Noon contests.
Sure, he’s A reason for all of that success. But THE reason? Raw numbers alone can’t tell anyone that conclusively, and I know for fact ESPN’s doing a lot less qualitative research in this era than they used to. They’re a lot less transparent about supplying that bakcup than they were a few years back when they were defending what started to become an online tsunami of bitching about an overreliance on Dallas Cowboys stories within FIRST TAKE, which back then was a more inclusive “embrace debate” forum than the pulpit it has now become for its other highly salaried and omnipresent personality Stephen A. Smith. Executives scrutinized minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings to point to spikes whenever the Cowboys topics cropped up and used it to warrant injecting it into their daily agendas at almost any time of the year.
Researchers are frequently tasked with supplying those sorts of graphic representations whenever post-mortems are convened as to where they think fine-tuning can be made to address valleys. When such detailed data was first made available Nielsen itself aggressively marketed it to clients as an add-on with the argument that it could theoretically replace qualitative samples since it was based upon the aggregate of thousands of homes projecting to millions of viewers that advertisers sheepishly accepted as gospel currency. More astute researchers didn’t fully buy into that argument. If one had the budget and support as ESPN did, you purchased it but augmented the what with the why. These days, Disney isn’t quite as generous with their investments in what they perceive is non-revenue-generating business. Could be because they have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to personalities like Smith and McAfee and now the beancounters want to squeeze every last red cent out of that investment. Last week THE SPORTING NEWS’ Sam Haider updated reports that began earlier this summer with exactly how steep that price tag has become:
Pat McAfee’s future at ESPN has been a talking point since June, when reports broke that the network was negotiating a new deal that could pay him $65 million a year. Those extension talks were already tied to reports of an expanded NFL role for McAfee, but nothing had been finalized.
When there’s only so many slices of a pie (pizza or otherwise)to be served, someone and/or something goes hungry. This seems to be what the most vocal critics of all things McAfee are contending–especially ones that are no longer being paid by ESPN themselves. One of the more prominent examples of that was my long-lost Oswego compadre Linda Cohn, now unshackled and making her own foray into digital media with a twice-weekly and rapidly growing podcast of her own. She made national news and gained a lot of followers with this take last week which Smith also expounded on:
Cohn had some blunt words for how much McAfee is being put center stage on The Linda Cohn Show’s livestream, as Awful Announcing detailed…. Notably, Cohn did praise McAfee and didn’t point the issues at him specifically, but rather at her former employer.
“I admire it all, but admiring what Pat McAfee has accomplished doesn’t mean I believe he needs to be everywhere at every time,” Cohn said. “Because, yeah, ESPN wants Pat McAfee to be everywhere at every time. How much Pat McAfee is enough Pat McAfee?! The answer apparently was more.”
“So, let’s review your potential Monday during the NFL season, which is just a couple of weeks away,” Cohn said. “Three hours of Pat’s daily show, The Pat McAfee Show, from the game site. Then, Pat joins Monday Night Countdown before the game. And then, on certain nights, potentially, his own alternative broadcast of Monday Night Football. At this point, let’s just call it ‘Monday Night McAfee.’“
Way too many trolls have come down on Cohn as expressing sour grapes, especially after she had been equally critical of how much less respect some of her now-former colleagues such as Ryan Clark, Bart Scott and (at least for a moment) Karl Ravech were shown the door versus the outsized celebration her last days at the once Worldwide Leader were given. But having spoken at length to her personally and knowing exactly how aware she was of how thorough the support process was versus it how it is in the now overly frugal Jimmy Pitaro era, I’m willing to wager a farthing she knows how much less informed their exponential increase in a flavor of the moment is now.
And by the by, ESPN is not alone in taking such lazy and simplistic approaches to content gluttony. Netflix convinced investors and most of all themselves the binge-watching was the only way for the cool kids to consume media. Yet even they are rethinking that, as METATOOLS.AI’s appropriately byline-shy site purported last month:
Netflix’s full-season binge-release model — dropping all episodes of a show at once — has been both a cultural phenomenon and a business experiment. While it drove massive initial viewership and helped Netflix dominate the streaming market, recent data and industry shifts suggest it may be showing signs of strain… Reports show some hits lose 50–70% of their initial audience by season two, with shows like Beef, Running Point, and The Four Seasons seeing steep declines…Netflix’s own data also shows that full-season drops burn out their own cultural momentum. Once a show peaks in social media buzz, it’s gone — replaced by the next Friday’s release — leaving no sustained weekly discussion…Netflix is experimenting with split-season releases and weekly drops on select titles signaling it may be adapting the model to combat churn and sustain engagement.
Getting back to McAfee, as recently as last week we were reminded that his presence alone doesn’t immediately assure a rate of return, as THE BIG LEAD’s Stephen Douglas gloated:
Even Pat McAfee couldn’t save the Patriot Games from awful ratings on ABC. According to Awful Announcing only 1.21 million viewers tuned in to watch the one-hour broadcast on Aug. 13. The ratings were less than half what “Press Your Luck” was getting in the same time slot the two weeks previous.
McAfee made a surprise appearance at the final on Tuesday. He arrived with President Donald J. Trump and spent the show sitting beside the president. He was also there to greet Trump when he got off Air Force One before the competition. McAfee then defended himself from critics by saying he wasn’t there in a political capacity and only cared about getting kids to exercise.
One might observe there were plenty of extraneous reasons for a significant portion of his Gen A base to not show up. Putting this spectacle on between episodes of two ancient-skewing game shows was likely a far bigger reason than any ideological argument one might choose to make. Much as a measurable portion of the gains and records he helped College GameDay achieve last year were due to methodological changes by Nielsen versus merely his taking over a seat once occupied by the beloved but clearly aging Lee Corso.
Much like the measured tone L-Co took if one actually had watched her podcast no one is saying McAfee shouldn’t have a shot at a greater presence on ESPN, and that ESPN isn’t wrong for wanting to bring in more of his minions that are otherwise not showing up for a traditional MNF broadcast or even the ManningCast, whose demonstrated skew is clearly Gen X. But going to that recipe book and expecting it to work all that often is not a guaranteed panacea. Just like expecting people to be happy with the same meal choice proved to be a learning experience for me.
And ESPN should have already known at least that. Do you recall the title of the failed morning show that FIRST TAKE first replaced? Yup, COLD PIZZA.
Until next time…