Pat McAfee addresses comments about ESPN, Norby Williamson: 'I don't take anything back'

Pat McAfee addressed his comments regarding ESPN’s potential sabotage of his show and executive Norby Williamson.

During Monday’s show, McAfee, live from the College Football Playoff National championship, addressed the controversy in full. That was before he transitioned into the NFL playoffs.

Throwing in a little sarcasm as he does, McAfee made his point clear.

“ESPN set us up pretty good here,” McAfee said Monday. “There were some comments about one particular person at ESPN you know that I made only on the YouTube, ESPN-plus show. That wasn’t even on linear TV. I didn’t know anybody was gonna hear it because he was just on digital. I guess everybody did hear it. 

“Topic of discussion obviously the entire weekend and the only thing that I’m like, super bummed out about at all is that a guy that we like a lot, a man that watched the game with us in the suite, Burke Magnus, who is currently new guy in charge of ESPN right below Jimmy Pitaro. I guess he was kind of made to look bad because of what I did and how I did it.” 

McAfee made sure to let everyone know him and his crew love and respect Burke. That wasn’t staged.

“I would like everybody to know, we love Burke Magnus,” McAfee said. “And also love Jimmy Pitaro. We love Bob Iger. But there is quite a transition here, you know, between the old and the new, new, new new and the old don’t like what’s new. But we’re very thankful.” 

Some could question why McAfee would say Williamson’s name out loud unless he was trying to cause controversy and perhaps get out of ESPN. He responded to that question.

“A lot of people are saying I’m trying to get fired, no way,” McAfee said. “What ESPN has been able to do for us more specifically, whenever they do things like this. You have no idea about the crew behind the scenes here that we’ve been working with basically all year, not only on GameDay, but for our show whenever we’re traveling. We got nothing but love for all of these people.” 

McAfee did not mention Williamson by name Monday, but said there are people in the company whom he and his crew do not like and vice versa.

“Now there’s certainly people we do not like,” McAfee said. “Certainly. And they do not like us, that’s how it’s gonna be. And I don’t take back anything that I said about said person, but the overall storyline about us and ESPN, I think people need to remember we’re strong. We are strong baby. We all understand what the future looks like. There’s just some old hags that potentially don’t but we will move forward to that.”