Andrew Marchand, the sports media insider at The Athletic, has been on the wrong end of some pretty public pushback in recent weeks. His column last week on Pat McAfee drew one of the more honest and humble screeds yet, with McAfee demeaning Marchand and his sources at ESPN while arguing it’s past time for the industry to leave him “the f*ck alone.”
The column, which was centered on McAfee’s seeming ban of ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter from The Pat McAfee Show, led to Schefter’s first appearance on the program in three months — as well as a long monologue from the host.
In his comments, McAfee called Marchand’s reporting “bullsh*t” based on a faulty understanding of the sports media business. McAfee also sent a message directly to ESPN management, thanking content head Burke Magnus for a show of support within Marchand’s piece while seemingly taking aim at VP of Production Seth Markman in thinly veiled jabs that appeared to accuse Markman of leaking to Marchand.
This week on his Marchand Sports Media podcast, Marchand defended his reporting and gave background on the timing of his column.
“If you don’t want this type of story, the first thing you shouldn’t do is, don’t be petty in the Adam Schefter situation,” Marchand said. “I’ve known about the Schefter thing, that he’s not been on for a while. So a month goes by, whatever, not going to make a big deal about it. Two months go by, alright, we’ll see. Three months go by, it’s a story. It’s Adam Schefter. He’s not on the air. Then I call up to ESPN, gonna write the story. Try to talk to McAfee, try to talk to ESPN. And then, hours later, I get word that he’s going to be on the next day.”
The Schefter situation — and a post by McAfee on social media that he is “up to something” business-wise — were the tipping points for a series of news items Marchand had collected about McAfee in recent months.
That included an incident behind the scenes on College GameDay in which McAfee became angry at a production staffer for airing a clip in which the former Indianapolis Colts punter swung and missed against an Oklahoma softball pitcher at their campus.
“Another way not to get stories like this out there, is don’t get mad at a low-level assistant when you’re shown swinging and missing against a softball player,” Marchand added. “I get it. McAfee was a Pro Bowl punter. He’s a big star. He cares about his image. I think he’s very smart about how he constructs what he does publicly. But [an] easy [way] not to have that part of the story is don’t try to find out an assistant’s name.”
Perhaps the biggest piece of news in Marchand’s column was that McAfee, who has two years left on his GameDay contract, has explored launching his own competitor to the historic ESPN program.
“The fact that he might do an alternative to GameDay is a story,” Marchand said.
Before launching into his explanation of the column, Marchand quoted longtime radio host Colin Cowherd. The quote boils down to Cowherd refusing to engage with opinions about his opinions. Marchand claimed he feels the same way about his reporting.
But in his explanation on his podcast, Marchand went pretty far to defend himself and heap critique back toward McAfee. Going further than a simple explanation of his work, The Athletic reporter accused McAfee of going after people “who can’t necessarily defend themselves.”
“Norby Williamson is an executive, a big-time executive, but can’t really publicly defend (himself),” Marchand said, referencing comments from the host last January toward an ESPN executive that may have contributed to the exec’s dismissal from the company.
Marchand also added recent incidents with the family of Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett and musician John Mellencamp to the list of things “people are going to write about.”
“If I’m ESPN, if I’m Burke Magnus, president of content, is that something you’d have on the air if you’re just doing a rundown, ever?” Marchand asked.
The Athletic insider dismissed Magnus’s assertion that he or any other sports media reporter is “obsessed” with McAfee or wants to see him fail, instead framing his coverage of McAfee as the expected result of his on-air behavior.
“Is that what you want on your air? I mean, ESPN has to decide,” Marchand said. “I don’t know if there’s anybody ‘obsessed’ with writing about Pat McAfee. But these are reasons people do write stories about Pat McAfee and why he’s been in the middle of the news.”
To an extent, McAfee has moved the goalpost for what is accepted at ESPN so quickly that it can be easy to overlook questionable behavior. And Marchand is not wrong that McAfee is one of the top people of interest in all of sports media, so just about everything he does is news.
At the same time, compared with incidents last year in which McAfee directly challenged Williamson or hosted Aaron Rodgers for a potentially defamatory conversation about fellow Disney employee Jimmy Kimmel, it has been a mostly quiet 2025 for McAfee.
But to suggest Marchand’s story was obsessive is perhaps misguided. His initial poking around caused McAfee to change his stance towards Schefter, who previously was a weekly guest. That itself is a fair reason for Marchand to dig further.
These two already have a long history of tension, and there’s no sign it will die down soon.