Former sports exec disputes claim Pat McAfee saved College GameDay after Kirk Herbstreit comments

Kirk Herbstreit gave credit to his colleague Pat McAfee for offering to help ESPN when it appeared the network’s budget cuts could affect College GameDay, but a former sports executive is now disputing that claim.

David Samson, the former executive vice president of the Montreal Expos and president of the Miami Marlins, doesn’t appear to believe that story.

“When a company is downsizing, they’re doing it purposefully, not in order to have the big feed talent like McAfee... pay to keep those people,” he said on his Nothing Personal with David Samson podcast.

“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.”

He added: “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.”

Samson disputes the idea that McAfee’s offer to help with costs had any influence on what ESPN, or more specifically Disney, the network’s owner, ultimately did.

“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,” he said.

That was in reaction to comments made by Herbstreit earlier this month, when he suggested that McAfee played a hand in helping College GameDay by offering to pay for some segments that were at risk during ESPN’s budget cuts.

“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,’” Herbstreit said.

“And Pat decided to say, ‘Okay, 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.”

Herbstreit said that McAfee’s offer caught some of the ESPN brass off-guard to the extent that they reconsidered the cuts.

“Upper management heard that and they said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.’ We don’t need Pat to cover that. We’ll take care of that,” he said.

Maybe that happened, maybe that didn’t happen, and maybe it happened but in a different way than was remembered, but Samson clearly doesn’t think it happened.

“Getting the money to have a band-aid put on a situation that you know is secreting blood and gunk in a way that can’t be stopped by one band-aid,” Samson said.

“Getting one band-aid seems irrelevant when you need two, and you may just need to wrap a tourniquet around the whole darn thing. Pat McAfee covering budget cuts at ESPN, he’s not.”

(Samson)

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