The worst sports media story of 2025: The Mary Kate Cornett controversy and fallout

This week, we’re celebrating the highs, the lows, the best, and the worst of the year with The Awfulies. As we’ve done for the past four years, the Awful Announcing staff has cast its votes for who we think should take home the coveted golden microphone in a wide variety of categories across the sports media industry.

Much has been said about the state of American media in 2025, in sports and beyond. Good journalism and ethical standards still exist in some places, but in many cases, they’ve been sidelined in the name of entertainment, virality, and “clicks,” to use the parlance of our time.

Instead of recognizing the quality of the work, media companies tout social engagement and video views. As such, support (and money) has been redistributed from professional journalists and industry veterans with strong knowledge bases towards proud buffoons and loud characters who speak their minds freely, regardless of truth or a desire to balance entertainment with ethics.

2025 saw the ascension of the Sports Media Bro Industrial Complex (SMBIC). Thanks in part to changes in attitudes and standards in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, Barstool Sports was welcomed into the mainstream, Pat McAfee cemented himself as the face of ESPN, and a collection of bro-centric podcasters, influencers, and content creators were elevated into the mainstream media ecosystem.

This also coincided with social media platforms run by Trump-friendly CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who removed what few guardrails had been put in place to protect users from false, misleading, or harmful content, instead prioritizing virality, especially for content they were aligned with or endorsed.

Empowered by the green light they’d been given by major corporations, media companies, social media platforms, and advertisers, the SMBIC unleashed itself on audiences across the media landscape, with the express (or implicit) permission to be themselves fully and not hold themselves accountable to any journalistic or ethical standards that had guided previous media generations.

In a nutshell, that’s how we ended up with the Mary Kate Cornett controversy, our pick for the worst sports media story of 2025.

In February, the name Mary Kate Cornett went viral on social media platforms out of nowhere. Cornett, an 18-year-old student at Ole Miss, was the subject of a salacious rumor about how she had cheated on her boyfriend with his father. Given the nature of the rumor and the way algorithms are weaponized to amplify it, it spread faster than any truth could keep up.

As happens in these situations, the dam broke quickly. Photos of her, her boyfriend, and his father spread rapidly on social media as people raced to post their zingers and ride the virality to engagement and more followers. So widespread and ever-present was the story that it quickly jumped the rail into the SMBIC.

On the February 26 episode of The Pat McAfee Show, which was broadcast on ESPN, host Pat McAfee brought up the rumor with a befuddled Adam Schefter, who was there to discuss the NFL Scouting Combine. Here’s a write-up from The Athletic’s Katie Strang:

He teases the subject, asking Schefter: “Have you heard about Ole Miss?” One of his cohorts says, “There is a ménage à trois …” that, McAfee adds, “has really captivated the internet.” After some more buildup, McAfee dives in.

“Some Ole Miss frat bro, k? Had a K-D (Kappa Delta) girlfriend,” McAfee says, and then he stresses the word “allegedly.”

“At this exact moment, this is what is being reported by … everybody on the internet: Dad had sex with son’s girlfriend.” Another person on set chimes in – “Not great” – and then McAfee adds: “And then it was made public … that’s the absolute worst-case situation.”

Schefter, looking befuddled and uncomfortable in the chair closest to McAfee, tries to redirect the conversation: “So where is (Ole Miss quarterback) Jaxson Dart in all this?”

McAfee never names the 18-year-old college freshman at the center of the rumor, but he jokes about shoehorning Ole Miss fathers into NFL Draft analysis — “We’re just wondering. His dad … We’re just trying to combine evaluate …” Then another person on set interjects: “Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now.”

McAfee wasn’t alone in using the salacious rumor for fodder. Barstool Sports personalities KFC Barstool and Jack Mac referenced the rumor on their social media accounts, with Mac promoting a memecoin named after Cornett. ESPN radio hosts in St. Louis eagerly discussed and analyzed the rumor, with one host reading a dramatized version of a supposed Snapchat message involving Cornett. Former NFL star Antonio Brown also posted about it on social media.

From there, the rumors gained another round of virality, in part because these shows and personalities legitimized them.

In the wake of all that, Cornett posted a statement through her father’s Facebook account, saying she was a victim of a “deliberate and coordinated cyberattack spreading categorically false and defamatory information.” She also called out Barstool, McAfee, and Brown for sharing “utter and complete lies with zero interest in the truth.”

In April, Cornett spoke with Strang at The Athletic, saying that, in the wake of the rumors spreading, she began receiving constant harassment, campus officials moved her to emergency housing, and she started taking courses online. She said that multiple members of her family had also been harassed and that her boyfriend had been targeted as well.

She also said she intended to file legal action against McAfee, ESPN, Barstool, and others who spread unsubstantiated rumors. She added that she had filed police reports with the Oxford Police Department, the Ole Miss campus police, and the FBI.

“I would like people to be held accountable for what they’ve done,” she told The Athletic. “You’re ruining my life by talking about it on your show for nothing but attention, but here I am staying up until 5 in the morning, every night, throwing up, not eating because I’m so anxious about what’s going to happen for the rest of my life.”

“I’m not a public figure that you can go talk about on your show to get more views,” she told NBC Nightly News of McAfee. “I don’t think these boys know what they’re doing to people.”

While Barstool owner Dave Portnoy initially sought praise for his company for not mentioning the rumor on its site and official platforms, he apologized to Cornett a week later and vowed to implement tighter editorial oversight.  Several Barstool employees, including Clancy and Jack Mac, also released apologies.

McAfee, meanwhile, took a different tack. Despite legal threats and pushback, especially following Cornett’s media appearances, he remained silent for a while. He finally alluded to the situation a little over a week later at his Big Night AHT live show in Pittsburgh, tying it to a previous defamation lawsuit filed against him by Brett Favre, which had been dismissed.

I’ll never forget my first lawsuit 😂😂

We’re good Brett Favre

I never wanna add negativity to a situation#BigNightAHT pic.twitter.com/nQFtoQSefL

— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) April 10, 2025

“I’m cool with Brett. Just like the current situation that is happening, where I have a lot of people saying that I should be sued,” McAfee said in apparent reference to Cornett. “I want to say this: I never, ever want to be a part of anything negative in anybody’s life, ever. That is not what I want to do… my lawyers are Pittsburgh lawyers, and they’re in here tonight… they have the same mindset as me: empathy but understanding reality.

“And for that whole thing that’s happening, I didn’t want to add any negativity as it was taking place like I did. We will try to figure that out and make some sort of silver lining in a very terrible situation. You can have that promise from me. It won’t be as impossible to be a fan of mine going forward.”

McAfee has long tried to establish a reputation as someone who cannot be pushed around or told what to do. Usually, that’s directed at ESPN’s “suits” and others in the sports media world. But given the circumstances and his role in the situation, it seemed an odd and unnecessary statement, coupled with a hint of that implacability that put him above reproach or criticism.

Whatever those Pittsburgh lawyers were doing behind the scenes, it took until late July for McAfee to finally address the situation and apologize to Cornett and her family.

“I think you all know from tuning into this program that I never want to be a source of negativity or contribute to another human’s suffering,” said McAfee. “And I can now happily share with you that I recently got to meet Mary Kate and her family. And I got a chance to sincerely apologize to them and acknowledge that what I said about Mary Kate was based solely on what others were saying on the internet, or what had previously been reported by others, and that we had no personal knowledge about Mary Kate or her personal life.

“I deeply regret all the pain that this caused. I hated watching what our show was a part of, in her interviews and reading about it. And my hope is that this can be something that we all learn from going forward. I know we certainly have.”

It’s unclear if the apology was intended to prevent further legal action or was part of a settlement with Cornett. “The matter was settled to each party’s satisfaction,” Justin Cornett, Mary Kate’s father, told The Athletic.

That it took so long to happen, especially when others had acted much faster, muted the impact for many critics. If that bothered McAfee, it’s unknown. He moved forward with a goal “to make the world a happier place, a better place.” Whether he’s accomplishing that remains unclear.

In the months since, Cornett has retreated into the anonymity she never asked to lose in the first place. Barstool, McAfee, and many other members of the SMBIC have continued on their trajectories with enriching business deals and record-breaking ratings. One would like to imagine that lessons were learned and new policies were put in place to reduce the likelihood of similar incidents happening again. Maybe they have.

But if we’ve learned anything about the SMBIC over the past year, it’s that they don’t take kindly to guardrails, policies, standards, or reflection. Those engagement numbers aren’t gonna boost themselves. Over time, the sting of being called out for amplifying false information about someone who didn’t deserve it fades. And given the ways ESPN coddles McAfee and Barstool succeeds despite any problematic missteps, it’s a fool’s errand to think there won’t be another Mary Kate Cornett situation too far down the road.