During the final, streaming-only, hour of The Pat McAfee Show today, host Pat McAfee called out ESPN Head of Event and Studio Production Norby Williamson by name, saying he believes the executive is intentionally trying to sabotage the show.
It is believed some of what McAfee was responding to was a New York Post article yesterday from Andrew Marchand with the headline, “Pat McAfee needs to produce better ratings to be worth $85 million – and headaches – for ESPN.” McAfee seems of the belief Williamson, or someone from ESPN, provided Marchand with faulty numbers.
“We are very appreciative and we understand that more people are watching this show than ever before,” McAfee started out. “We are very thankful for the ESPN folks being very hospitable. Now there are some people actively trying to sabotage us from within ESPN. More specifically, I believe, Norby Williamson is the guy who is attempting to sabotage our program.”
McAfee continued, “I am not 100% sure, that is just seemingly the only human that has the information and then somehow that information gets leaked and it’s wrong. And then it sets a narrative of what our show is.”
Taking it to another level, McAfee went on to say, “Are we just going to combat that from a rat every single time? I dont know. But someone tried to get ahead of our actual ratings release with wrong numbers,12 hours beforehand, that’s a sabatoge attempt..and its been happening basically this entire season from some people who didnt necessairly love the ol’ addition of The Pat McAfee show to the ESPN family.
Theres a lot of those. Weve heard them anonymously quoted in the Washington Post, and the NY Post, and the NY Times and the LA Times, in Wall Sreet Journal. And they’re never like ‘I love the show,’ it’s always like little things to try and tear us down.”
McAfee than mentioned a past history with Williamson, saying “That guy left me in his office for 45 minutes, no-showed me, in 2018. So this guy has had zero respect for me…for a long time.”
At the conclusion of the discussion, McAfee added, “We are still growing somehow. We are trying to do it as right as possible. We have good intentions every single time we come in here. We dont always get it right, but motherfu**ers (have) been getting it wrong for a long time in this specific field.”
Today, ESPN PR put out a release touting McAfee’s success across ESPN, YouTube and TikTok, noting a combined average viewers per episode number of 886,000.
