Pat McAfee Stepped Up After a Major Donor Failed to Deliver for WVU Football

It's been a long season for the West Virginia Mountaineers, and things won't get any easier anytime soon. With all of the new faces and injuries that the team has suffered along the way, it's been the perfect recipe for a disaster, which is why WVU sits at 2-5 entering tonight's game against TCU.

During ESPN's College GameDay this morning, former West Virginia punter/kicker Pat McAfee revealed that he covered for a WVU donor, who didn't come through in full on NIL payments.

“There was a Wednesday that I got a call from Rich Rodriguez, who was my college football coach — a man that I think is going to be able to do good things at West Virginia — and one of our biggest donors decided he was not going to give the amount of money that we thought he was potentially going to give and they needed the money by the next day. They were like, Hey, we need this money by the next day because we got these guys that we made these promises to, and now the money isn’t coming from where we thought it was going to come through. And I said, ‘Alright, I’ll help.’ So, I sent the money over. I didn’t even think to myself, man, I should get some leverage here. I should get some say in who’s playing because I think every guy I potentially played, on their way out of the door already. They have not won a lot of games, but I didn’t say that. I just wanted to help the program.”

Your boosters can really change your university and your football team..

A lot of these money people are gonna wanna have a say in what’s going on..

That’s the reality of the College Football world that we’re in right now #CollegeGameDay pic.twitter.com/zfNOrdf4Yh
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) October 25, 2025

McAfee, of course, did not reveal who the donor or company was, but it just goes to show how difficult it can be to fund a competitive football team. Donors can pull money or decide to stop sending money to the program if the team is struggling and they're not seeing a return on their investment.

While this is not an ideal situation, Rodriguez did state earlier this week that he feels good about where they are financially.

“The difference is, we’ll be better positioned financially than we were a year ago. Without going into all the details, there were a lot of holes that we needed and didn’t basically have the type of ability to get and fix those holes financially. Some of the ones here were going to get a bigger payday no matter what happened, but there were others that we wanted to bring (or keep) and all that, but we’re in a different place. I’m fortunate we have an athletic director and we have a board, and we have supporters that know what needs to happen and understand what we got to do moving forward. We’re in a completely different spot."

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