Pat McAfee has been broadcasting his sports talk show from the NFL Scouting Combine this week at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. and has welcomed a variety of special guests on the program. On Thursday’s edition of the show, he broke news that Travis Kelce is planning to return to the NFL and play his 13th season next year as the Kansas City Chiefs presumably look to avenge a Super Bowl defeat by the Philadelphia Eagles. The news was part of the discussion on the most-recent episode of Toucher & Hardy on 98.5 The Sports Hub, and it elicited confusion about the premise of the afternoon show.
Toucher offered his congratulations to McAfee in having the phone number for Kelce, but he also contended that McAfee only has a show because of paying Aaron Rodgers to be a weekly guest.
“Now let’s address this, ‘Fred, you’re jealous of Pat McAfee,’” Toucher said. “Okay, let’s go [through] people that are better than me and more successful than me at radio that I like. Howard Stern, Charlamagne tha God, Mad Dog, Paul Finebaum.”
Toucher then averred that he named four people who fit this category, and he later added ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith to that list as well. Furthermore, he voiced that McAfee was not part of this cadre of accomplished hosts before proceeding to give his opinion about the former NFL punter and multimedia superstar.
“Pat McAfee sucks, and if you listen to him, you’re an idiot,” Toucher said. “You really might be an idiot, and the best is, ‘You don’t get it.’ Oh no, I get it. He works for Disney. This isn’t some guy on pirate radio here changing the way the game’s played. I guess I get that he can say the s-word, and that’s tremendous. It’s very exciting. I could hear that from any kid, but I can hear it from Pat McAfee.”
Rob “Hardy” Poole, who has been co-hosting the morning drive show with Toucher for just over a year, conveyed that he believes there is still jealousy of the people who get the show. Toucher had expressed that some people may accuse him of not understanding the program because of his age, but he pointed out that this was not the case. On the contrary, he seemed to place some of the criticism through doing work with entities owned by The Walt Disney Company.
“Once you work for the Disney company, any cool, rebellious factor that you might be hanging on to is long gone,” Toucher said. “You are in a long, corporate game. You are a peg in the cog. I am jealous about how he leveraged garbage views on YouTube into a really lucrative TV gig. That I am jealous of because, again, if I was running ESPN, I’d go, ‘What is everyone talking about? Oh, his Aaron Rodgers interviews.’ I think he was brilliant to pay Aaron Rodgers a million dollars a year to do his show because that’s the only thing people talked about.”
Toucher proceeded to express that McAfee was “a silly goose punter” that the media liked hearing from and that he did not care for him. Nonetheless, he also claimed that McAfee is probably a nice guy but someone he does not want to hang out with and considers annoying.
“You’re jealous that he broke news,” Poole said. “I can’t figure out what you’re jealous of. You’re definitely jealous though.”
“No, I just know sometimes what’s going to come in, and I’m heading you off here,” Toucher replied. “I just named a bunch of guys currently doing radio that are more successful than me that I respect, and there you go. Now you have them. Pat McAfee’s not one of them.”
ESPN licensed The Pat McAfee Show for 235 episodes a year under a multiyear deal beginning prior to the start of the last football season. In addition to his hosting obligations, he also provides analysis for episodes of College GameDay during the football season and is also working as a color commentator on the Netflix presentation of WWE Monday Night Raw.
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