It seemingly came out of nowhere this week when longtime ESPN NFL Draft analyst Todd McShay bashed his former colleague, Paul Finebaum, as a “coward.”
The two never appeared to have bad blood while they worked together, and McShay hadn’t worked for the Worldwide Leader in more than two years. However, we are now discovering that the beef originated just before McShay’s departure, when Finebaum went out of his way to deny reporting that McShay had mentioned around top defensive prospect Jalen Carter ahead of that year’s draft.
McShay described the disagreement on Wednesday in an appearance on the Stugotz and Company podcast. Apparently, he heard noise about Finebaum during his time at ESPN, but never had an issue with the SEC Network host personally. McShay hinted at a few incidents in which Finebaum “crossed a line” by not being a loyal teammate, but none were big enough to fight over.
“I worked with Paul and under the same umbrella for about a decade. There were several things that rubbed me the wrong way,” McShay explained.
“There were people who just didn’t like Paul in the building. We’d go out to, whether it was the Rose Bowl or a bowl game or the national championship, and he would be there. And the comments from other people that I would overhear or be in a circle of people talking, ‘He didn’t look like the rest of us, he didn’t know ball.’ All those things. ‘He’s a different cat.’ And I never got involved in that. I’ve had a lot of accusations against me and some are probably true. Some of them are not, and I would defend. But I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being a bad teammate. I think there’s a loyalty. And several times over the years, he crossed the line on that.”
The way Finebaum reacted to his intel on Carter was the final straw for McShay.
Early in the draft process, McShay revealed that questions about Carter’s character were raised among his sources. Just before the draft, news broke that Carter was the driver of a vehicle involved in an accident in which a Georgia offensive lineman was killed near Athens.
While Carter ultimately turned himself in and pleaded no contest, most would see the incident as precisely the sort of decision that most football executives like to describe under the broad umbrella of “character issues.”
That doesn’t mean McShay should have taken a victory lap, but it would seemingly have backed up his previous intel. Not in Finebaum’s book.
Instead of referencing McShay’s reporting, Finebaum continued to deny it even after the news of the crash, saying “all I heard was the contrary” in an appearance on First Take while calling out McShay by name.
“The Jalen Carter situation … was what pushed me off the edge,” McShay explained this week on Stugotz and Company. “I don’t trust the man, I think he’s a coward of a man. And that’s it.”
McShay teased that he would discuss his problems with Finebaum in more depth on his podcast on Thursday.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.