Pat McAfee on Monday stood behind his comments last week calling out ESPN executive Norby Williamson, and Dan Le Batard thought it was interesting Pat would take on one in such a high position of power at the network.
On The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on Monday, Le Batard referred to Williamson as the shadow president of the network.
“The guy who runs, the shadow president, this isn’t just a Vice President,” Le Batard said. “This is the guy who’s run on the wrong side of Stuart Scott and Dan Patrick, and in general this is not a bug, this is a feature. This is how you keep people controlled when you don’t want your talent misbehaving. And your talent can be disposable, and you want the letters to matter more than anything else.
“The way that it has worked in my experience, I wasn’t there the whole time, is that the real power at ESPN resides with the CEO,” he continued. “Skipper, Shapiro before that, Pitaro now. The guy dealing with the billion-dollar deals is the real power, and then there’s a gulf of difference between executive number one and executive number two, where the second executive is just keeping the trains on the tracks because they’ve got a lot of channels – a lot of content – and if you could do that without headlines, you have succeeded. And Norby Williamson has succeeded for many years protecting SportsCenter, protecting the brand.”
Dan Le Batard felt as if Williamson and others in positions of power, not Bob Iger, Burke Magnus, or Pitaro, as well as others at ESPN who control power, have been usurped by the agreement struck to bring McAfee and his show to the network.
Because McAfee has been licensed to ESPN, not hired by ESPN like all the other talent on the network, Pat doesn’t have to play by the same rules as others.
“Once you’ve given that person unprecedented power, I think all of us can say given that he took a pay cut to be there – tore up a deal like ours with DraftKings in order to take less money in exchange for the reach of ESPN so that they could rent Pat McAfee’s voice,” he said. “Why does he have to respect their constructs? He does not have to respect their constructs, and I think that’s where you get into a difficult spot where the producers aren’t gonna actually be able to control him.”
