Linda Cohn: Pat McAfee, Stephen A. Smith are both the faces of ESPN

Linda Cohn spent 34 years watching the face of ESPN evolve. She has a more informed perspective on the question than most.

Appearing on Yahoo Sports Daily following her retirement from the Worldwide Leader, Cohn was asked whether Pat McAfee had supplanted Stephen A. Smith as the face of the network.

“It’s apples and oranges,” she said. “They’re totally different people, totally different shows, totally different lanes they’re in.”

The question, in her view, presupposes a hierarchy that doesn’t exist. According to Cohn, both men occupy the same rarified space at ESPN simultaneously, just through entirely different avenues.

Her historical reference point for McAfee wasn’t Smith. It was Dan Patrick. Patrick built The Dan Patrick Show into a fully independent production with a loyal core crew around him, syndicated nationally and eventually acquired by NBC, without surrendering creative ownership to anyone. McAfee replicated that blueprint on a grander scale, cultivating a massive audience outside ESPN before licensing the show to the network under an arrangement that left him with complete creative control.

“My former colleague Dan Patrick did that way before,” Cohn said. “Dan had built a team of guys around him in his little man cave type of situation. Pat McAfee basically did the same thing, and kudos to him. He built it up even bigger, and he convinced ESPN and anyone else who wanted to take him on that it was the right move.”

McAfee is now reportedly in talks on an extension worth $60 to $65 million per year, a figure that would make him the highest-paid personality in sports media history on paper and one that has already reshaped the salary landscape across the industry. It was McAfee’s original deal that pushed the market upward and ultimately created the conditions for Smith to land his own nine-figure contract, something Smith has acknowledged repeatedly and publicly, even as reports of friction between the two have surfaced and resurfaced throughout their time as ESPN colleagues.

Cohn had no interest in diminishing Smith’s standing in that equation. The criticism that he doesn’t genuinely watch games and operates purely from headlines is a persistent one in sports media circles — including from former colleagues — and she acknowledged its existence without subscribing to it.

“Stephen A. is one of the hardest-working people, next to Adam Schefter, in this business,” she said. “He’s asked to do things, he’s always on, he hardly ever says no. He does radio, he has his own channel, he does TV as we know, he does First Take, and he’s a survivor. He just keeps going. That’s in his DNA.”

Neither man, however, represents the ESPN that Cohn devoted 34 years of her career to. The network she came up in was one where the programming was the product, and no single personality was bigger than the institution that housed them.

“Back in the day, it was Chris Berman. The golden era of SportsCenter with Keith and Dan. Rich Eisen, myself, and so many other talented colleagues of mine,” Cohn said. “But the game has changed.”