David Samson doesn’t work at ESPN. But when it comes to Kirk Hebrstreit’s recent claim that Pat McAfee helped save the College GameDay crew from enduring budget cuts, the former Miami Marlins president has enough business experience to have some serious doubts.
On Wednesday’s episode of his show, Nothing Personal, Samson took a call from a viewer asking how he would handle an employee like McAfee making him a similar offer. The question came in reference to comments Herbstreit recently made on the Next Man Up podcast, in which the former Ohio State quarterback recalled his College GameDay colleague offering to cover cuts, which prompted ESPN executives to reverse course.
“Budget is always a big thing in our industry and trying to cut back on certain things,” Herbstreit said. “And they made an announcement that they were going to cut back on this and cut back on that. And we were on a Zoom and Pat was listening to that, even I was listening to that like, ‘Why are they cutting back on that? That doesn’t make any sense.’ And Pat decided to say, ‘OK, if you’re going to cut back on that, I’ll cover that. I’ll cover that. Because the crew, the people around the show, they need to have that. They need to have that.’”
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Herbtreit’s comments proceeded to go viral, with many citing them as evidence of McAfee’s team-first mindset and charitable nature. But while his efforts may have been noble, Samson questioned how much change he truly enacted.
“When a company is downsizing, they’re doing it purposefully, not in order to have the big feed talent like McAfee, like a [Dan] Le Batard pay to keep those people,” Samson said. “They’re doing it because they believe it’s in the best interest of the company to not have those people in the positions they’re in. You may think that layoffs, mass layoffs, it’s just Elon Musk-like doing DOGE where they just go in and instead of taking sort of a careful pen to making a change, they just blow torch it. That’s not actually how layoffs work in a company.
“It starts at the top where you say to your immediate reports, ‘we need to cut a billion dollars from our budget.’ Then it goes down to their reports… it flows downstream like a river. And what runs through it is the concept of, ‘can we do what we’re doing with a different group of people who make less money?’ What you don’t want to hear from your direct reports or from anybody is a response to, “oh, budget cut? You need me to find a million dollars? No problem. Here’s a million dollars. I’ll take care of it and I will pay these people directly.'”
To be clear, Herbstreit didn’t appear to be referencing employees’ jobs being in question with the budget cuts that McAfee had offered to cover. Still, Samson remained steadfast that if ESPN felt it needed to save a certain amount of money, it was going to find a way to do so.
“If you think that Pat McAfee saying that changes the philosophy of Disney and that Disney will stand up and say, ‘alright, we’ll do that. We’re not going to fire anyone in your crew’ and you think that somehow is a seminal change in what Disney’s doing in any cost-cutting measures that they and all companies are always doing, then you’re high like Pat could be —and I don’t mean on drugs, I just mean in general, on life.
“Because if you don’t fire X in Y’s department, you’re going to fire B in C’s department. You can bet your sweet bipsters that you are going to get to the number that your superior and their superior and their boss needs to get to, through hell or high water. It does not matter.”
That may very well be the case, but that also wasn’t necessarily Herbstreit’s point. Taking the longtime college analyst at his word, College GameDay‘s cast was presented with budget cuts that ultimately never came to fruition after McAfee offered to cover them himself.
Did ESPN turn around and simply find a way to save money elsewhere? It’s certainly possible, if not likely. In fact, according to Samson, you can bet your sweet bipsters that’s exactly how this played out.
About Ben Axelrod
Ben Axelrod is a veteran of the sports media landscape, having most recently worked for NBC's Cleveland affiliate, WKYC. Prior to his time in Cleveland, he covered Ohio State football and the Big Ten for outlets including Cox Media Group, Bleacher Report, Scout and Rivals.