Pat McAfee looks on during the game between the Miami Hurricanes and Ohio State Buckeyes during the 2025 Cotton Bowl and quarterfinal game of the College Football Playoff at AT&T Stadium. Credit: Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images
By Sean Keeley on

This originally appeared in the Thursday edition of  The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything you need to know about the sports media world.

Move over McDreamy and McSteamy, make way for McAfee and McCarthy.

Wednesday, ESPN officially unveiled “The Year of the Super Bowl,” a 12-month celebration across multiple platforms building toward ESPN’s first-ever Super Bowl production in February 2027.

Any sports fan not living under a rock would know about this already, given how much pomp and circumstance they put into “The Handoff,” their 24-hour event spanning SoFi Stadium to Disneyland, in which Chris Berman symbolically passed coverage responsibilities to Scott Van Pelt for Super Bowl LXI coverage.

Michael McCarthy was covering the announcement for Front Office Sports and even dropped a few extra nuggets on Tuesday about what Disney and ESPN might have planned for their Super Bowl. He reported that they were considering a “family-friendly altcast” featuring one of their iconic IPs, such as The Simpsons or Star Wars (ESPN has already effectively announced a ManningCast Super Bowl altcast).

He also reported that the company was considering adding a Field Pass with The Pat McAfee Show altcast for the Super Bowl, but noted that the idea “faces rights hurdles.”

About three hours later, McAfee took to X to offer a reply to McCarthy’s announcement. “BREAKING: Source(s) tell me that the rights hurdle is very hurdle-able,” he wrote. “Would be absolutely bonkers.”

That’s all pretty normal, but it was the attached image that made things so very Pat McAfee. In a petty move, the mercurial host had taken a screenshot of McCarthy’s post but cropped out all credits to McCarthy or Front Office Sports.

Sensing an opportunity, McCarthy quoted McAfee’s credit-less aggregation by saying it won’t hurt him to include “the dreaded letters” FOS and invited him to connect.

In the subsequent hours, McAfee’s selective editing didn’t go entirely unnoticed, and, in a curious change of pace from his usual relationship with the media, he offered a follow-up that included credit to FOS.

The turnaround is curious on two fronts. One, as noted, McAfee’s relationship with sports media reporters is usually adversarial. Two, McAfee didn’t seem to receive too much, if any, public pushback from the cut-and-paste move. So why feel the need to reverse course?

We can speculate that either there was a McAfee-McCarthy McConnection to smooth things over, or someone at ESPN asked McAfee to play nice, given how important “The Year of the Super Bowl” campaign is to the company.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the GameDay analyst has hijacked ESPN’s best laid PR plans. Perhaps he was mad that he had been scooped, which is understandible, though a bit naive to expect, given his status in the sports media world. But given how important the corporate synergy at play seems to be for Disney and ESPN, this might have been one defiant move too many, even if it didn’t seem to break sports media containment.

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.

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