ESPN’s College GameDay is in the midst of its best viewership era, and a large part of that is the odd-couple dynamic between 74-year-old Nick Saban and 38-year-old Pat McAfee.
Along with the camaraderie they’ve built on the Saturday show, Saban has become a regular guest on. McAfee’s weekly program, where he seems much looser than he ever did on the sidelines.
In a way, this unlikely friendship had been forged years earlier, and Saban recalled the first time he realized McAfee could harness college football’s strongest power: Pettiness.
“I will never forget when you got all of Georgia fired up and then picked Alabama..
You can never match that” 😂😂 ~ Coach Saban#PMSLive https://t.co/DyuLprbn7S pic.twitter.com/3iYMe8c70P
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) November 7, 2025
“The greatest motivator for this generation is if somebody dogs them, somebody disrespects them, and you can use that to motivate your team,” Saban said Friday on The Pat McAfee Show. “I loved it. I was hoping you guys [on College GameDay] picked the other team. … (But) the greatest of all time is what you did in the (2023) Georgia-Alabama game, when you had all those Georgia people all fired up about how you were going to pick them. You could never match that.”
For much of his time on GameDay, McAfee developed a reputation for always picking the home team, or the school whose fans were most likely to give him a pop from the crowd. In the lead-up to the 2023 SEC Championship Game, McAfee seemed to be staying the course when he started signing Georgia’s “Who’s That Comin’ Down the Track,” before pulling a switcheroo on “drunk, obnoxious” Georgia fans and picking Saban’s Alabama to win instead, which they did.
The troll was inspired by Georgia fans’ complaints about McAfee replacing former Bulldogs quarterback David Pollack on the GameDay panel, making it an early example of his oft-displayed pettiness. Regardless, it was a fairly epic troll.
“(That was) LEGENDARY for me,” McAfee said of Alabama winning that game. “I appreciate the hell out of you. … That’s why college football is great, man. That type of situation is why college football is great.”
About Sean Keeley
Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.