As we’ve learned at Awful Announcing, Pat McAfee often sees what’s written about him.
Specifically, he has an eye for negative things—or at least what he perceives as negative.
Just this week, the former Indianapolis Colts punter put the kibosh on a Front Office Sports column that floated whether his Field Pass altcast, which ESPN has penciled into both Monday Night Football and its Super Bowl LXI altcast slate, was really a backdoor tryout for the MNF booth — currently embroiled in its own drama — in the ill-fated Dennis Miller mold. The column tugged on a thread first pulled during a discussion on The Ringer’s Press Box, but McAfee dismissed the entire premise as invented. A few days later, he further poured cold water on the idea and accused the people spreading the theory of trying to “continue to pour gas on a fire of people that hate my guts.”
He insisted color commentary was never his destiny. Entertaining people in their living rooms was.
On that front, few personalities in sports media can whip a crowd into a lather like McAfee, and fewer still move the needle as reliably, even as his ubiquity has become overexposure for a sizable slice of the audience. Beyond his Saturday perch, he fronts a weekday show that ESPN licenses, turns up across nearly every corner of the network’s NFL and college football coverage, is in the middle of negotiating an extension that could reportedly reach $60 million a year and has even ventured into country music with an album knowingly titled “The Diary of a Polarizing Figure.”
That brings us to Saturday’s College GameDay, where McAfee took another swipe at something written about him. The desk was marveling at James Madison’s start to the 2026 campaign when Rece Davis noted that two of the program’s former head coaches, Curt Cignetti (Indiana) and Bob Chesney (UCLA), were also unbeaten before getting to Billy Napier, the program’s current coach. Davis suggested Napier had suddenly figured out how to coach now that he was in Harrisonburg. But he was joking, of course
“I’ve always thought Billy could coach,” Davis said. “That was a joke.”
“Oh, really? Don’t be joking on here! New York Times is gonna write an article about you! Don’t do it, Rece!” McAfee said. “College football’s fun. GameDay might be fun too. Don’t do that, Rece. I promise you. We’re in the entertainment business.”
Rece Davis: “I’ve always thought Billy could coach. That was a joke.”
Pat McAfee: “Oh, really? Don’t be joking on here! New York Times is gonna write an article about you! Don’t do it, Rece!” https://t.co/oKN6iwHYZg
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 17, 2026
McAfee was obviously referring to a Jerry Brewer column published in The Athletic (a New York Times-owned outlet) on Thursday, arguing that GameDay now belongs to McAfee. And it’s not as if Brewer didn’t give McAfee his flowers. He credited him for the “Kicking Is Easy” contest, which grew out of a Washington student’s sign in 2023 and has since awarded more than $11 million in prizes and charitable donations, and he praised McAfee’s knack for working a crowd along with the odd-couple chemistry with Nick Saban that often carries the three-hour broadcast. Brewer’s thesis was that GameDay has become so centered on McAfee that it no longer feels like “the ultimate gathering place for all fans,” no matter how high the ratings climb.
Ratings measure how many people are watching, not what they’re watching, and Brewer found no shortage of moments this fall in which GameDay seemed to lose sight of the on-campus celebration that built its reputation. Take McAfee backing Sacramento State against Bowling Green while admitting he knew next to nothing about either side, or a Knoxville wedding segment fans panned as cringeworthy. How could we forget the September stop in Austin, where Rece Davis gave Sen. Ted Cruz roughly eight minutes, two more than Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, to hawk the Protect College Sports Act?
Brewer also turned his column to Kirk Herbstreit, now in his 30th season and the panelist with the longest memory of what GameDay used to be, who has said McAfee’s arrival rescued him from growing tired of the job.
After the Cruz interview, Herbstreit claimed he didn’t follow politics closely enough to know why the crowd was booing, though he did commend Cruz for pushing through it. To Brewer, the fact that the person best equipped to read the lawn treated its message as background noise spoke to a larger problem. GameDay now serves the fans who show up at dawn alongside McAfee’s audience, bettors, ESPN, and the politicians and conferences who see the set as a platform. When those interests clash, it’s no longer obvious which one the show answers to first.
Brewer is hardly alone in wondering who GameDay is for anymore, as the show has weathered criticism over its politics, its narrow focus on the Big Ten and SEC, and its drift away from the playful spirit that defined the Lee Corso era.
Our Sean Keeley wrote in September about college football fans falling out of love with Saturday pregame shows, mourning how the whimsy of the Corso years had given way to agenda-pushing, political detours and a take-it-or-leave-it posture toward critics. Last week, after McAfee shrugged off the Sacramento State pick and Herbstreit wondered aloud whether Fresno State-Boise State even counted as a conference game, viewers hammered the panel for its indifference to anything outside the Big Ten and SEC. And after a Texas crowd drowned out Cruz with boos and a “Ted you suck” chant, Matt Yoder argued that the show increasingly caters to its talent and its parent company ahead of the sport, particularly with Disney lobbying for the very bill Cruz came to peddle.
Still, none of that has dented the bottom line. GameDay is fresh off its most-watched season ever; its audience is skewing younger and more female, and Brewer conceded the numbers are climbing again this fall.
On Saturday, amid McAfee’s New York Times tirade, Herbstreit cited one of Lee Corso’s many famous lines: “We’re in the entertainment business, and college football is our vehicle.” As long as viewership trends hold, ESPN has little reason to treat a Times column or a reader survey as more than social media noise, and McAfee’s insistence that the show trades in entertainment also serves as the network’s handiest rebuttal.
The post Pat McAfee takes aim at New York Times column during ‘College GameDay’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.