Earlier in the week, ESPN began revealing its rankings of the Top 100 Athletes of the 21st Century, which accounts for athletic accomplishments since Jan. 1, 2000. A panel of experts and the ESPN Stats and Information Group ranked the top 100 athletes across all sports, eliciting over 75,000 votes from ESPN reporters, analysts, producers, editors and worldwide experts. The methodology condensed a list of 400 athletes to 100, and the company is revealing a quarter of the list every day through Thursday. The topic of the list came up today on The Pat McAfee Show.
McAfee previewed that ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky would be appearing on the program. McAfee described Orlovsky as someone who has “been on ESPN all morning having the exact same conversation for the past three shows,” and proceeded to say that they would probably “cook him and ESPN as a whole for a lot of the sh** they’ve been putting out from ESPN’s people.” The sharp criticisms of the network continued through McAfee’s opening monologue that spoke about the ranking venture.
“Now there is a Top 100 list that is coming out from ESPN people, and I’ll tell you what,” McAfee said. “It is the epitome of everything that everybody hates about ESPN. What they chose to do in ranking the Top 100 athletes of the 21st century – they only gave us [51] to 100 yesterday. What a sh*t show – what an absolute terrible list, and we’ll blame Dan Orlovsky for that.”
Once McAfee had Orlovsky on the show as his first guest, he began to presume that the current moment was when Orlovsky would commence the “Dan Wagon” and highlight 7-8 different quarterbacks in the NFL. From there, McAfee felt that in November, Orlovsky would go back and reference what he said prior to the season to demonstrate if he was correct or wrong about his predictions.
McAfee then referenced another list of the Top 10 quarterbacks in the NFL that was compiled by ESPN through votes from executives, scouts and coaches. The list was a topic of discussion across both Get Up! and First Take on Tuesday morning, and Orlovsky appeared on both programs to provide his sentiments and opinions towards the outline.
“I’ve seen you get very heated,” McAfee said to Orlovsky. “I didn’t hear everything you said, but I saw your eyes get real big with what everybody else has said.”
Orlovsky replied that for the last couple of years, he has been trying to expand the quarterback conversation to include the top eight or 14 such players at the position because of the talent and skill within the NFL. The conversation then continued, with McAfee explaining that he wanted to do “the bigger conversation” in order to “actually try to change sports media here.” McAfee returned on the air for his show on Monday after taking a two-week hiatus due to coverage of the Wimbledon Championships on ESPN.
