Pat McAfee’s primetime ESPN special draws weak viewership

Pat McAfee may be in line for the largest talent contract ever awarded by ESPN, but even his star can only shine so bright.

Last month’s primetime special edition of The Pat McAfee Show on ESPN drew just 278,000 viewers across its two-hour window beginning at 8 p.m. ET, per data from Sports Business Journal. The special show featured commissioners of six different sports leagues and was billed as a “State of the Union” for sports. The entire program came together in about a day, after ESPN needed to fill programming following the New York Knicks’ sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Viewership for the show does not include digital platforms like YouTube, where McAfee maintains a popular presence. For comparison, the deciding Game 4 between the Knicks and Cavs averaged 7.2 million viewers. The gulf between viewership for such a game and that of McAfee’s primetime special illustrates exactly how valuable live sports programming is to a network like ESPN.

Earlier on Tuesday, a report surfaced that McAfee is in the midst of negotiating an extension with the Worldwide Leader worth between $60 million and $65 million per year. ESPN currently licenses The Pat McAfee Show for approximately $17 million per year, and pays McAfee additional salary through a separate arrangement for his appearances on College GameDay and his various alternate telecasts.

While McAfee didn’t command quite the primetime audience his star-studded lineup of commissioners likely deserved, his value to ESPN is undeniable. McAfee drives more headlines for ESPN through his access to high-level athletes and executives than the network could ever have dreamed of before licensing his show. Additionally, McAfee is the central character in the all-important college football studio program College GameDay. Throw in the fact that McAfee draws in a younger audience, and his programming is as good as gold for ESPN, even if his primetime one-off was a dud.

Perhaps the primetime show does outline some of the limits to McAfee’s stardom, however. The daytime sports host doesn’t necessarily translate to ESPN’s nighttime audience, which generally expects to see a live sporting event at that time. Even if McAfee is interviewing some of the most important figures in sports, there appears to be limited interest in that type of content, at least among ESPN’s primetime viewers.