On Saturday morning, ahead of the second college-football weekend of the new season, Pat McAfee was up to his old tricks behind ESPN’s College GameDay desk. He delivered a typically long WWE-style soliloquy gassing up the home team and the town they were broadcasting from (Austin, Texas, in this case). Next was a drawn-out a cappella song — The Eyes of Texas, to no one’s surprise — as his co-hosts, reasonable, suited-down, fully sleeved setup men whom McAfee can play foil to, smiled nervously and looked on. McAfee then delivered several head-fakes about which team he predicted to win, riling up the hometown crowd. At one point, he cut the sleeves off his button-front shirt, returning to the tank-top look that was his trademark for years. Finally, McAfee’s actual game prediction was timed to coincide with four T-38 Air Force jets flying overhead. 

McAfee is the obvious star of the show. But now, ESPN wants him to be the star of seemingly every show it can fit him into. His podcast, The Pat McAfee Show, in which he stands and breathlessly expounds on the sports issues of the day inside his DraftKings ThunderDome studio, airs for two hours every weekday. On Monday, he began appearing on the network’s Monday Night Countdown, which airs just ahead of Monday Night Football, as well as at halftime. For those who want even more McAfee on Monday nights, he’ll be hosting his own alt-cast commenting on the game during the weeks Peyton and Eli Manning’s popular alt-cast is on break, according to reporting from “The Athletic.”

McAfee, a retired NFL punter, is very much a man of his time. Though he’s 39 years old, he often acts like a big kid. He’s got loose-cannon charisma; more opinions than he has airtime for; a masculine, retired-football-player vibe with insider insight; and a heartland-coded sensibility. He’s prone to standing on his desk before a crowd: an example of his seemingly limitless energy. He had a prominent role in WWE for several years. He feels like an important pillar of the conservative cultural shift that crested with Trump’s second election — the 2020s Sun Belt–ification of America. McAfee has a Joe Rogan–like openness to conspiracy theories (he gives the cantankerous QB Aaron Rodgers time to air thoughts on Anthony Fauci, Dianna Russini, media coverage, and whatever else rankles him) and intermittent regard for journalistic ethics. But his main-character energy makes for engaging if divisive — and, either way, lucrative — television. ESPN is widely rumored to be offering McAfee a new contract worth up to $65 million per year.

In his few waking hours off the ESPN airwaves, he finds novel ways to remain at the center of culture. In mid-August, McAfee appeared as Trump’s companion at the Patriot Games, a high-school sporting event founded by the president. With the help of Jelly Roll, McAfee released a country-music album last month, The Diary of a Polarizing Figure (the reviews of which were also polarizing, except from ESPN co-workers, who unanimously lauded it online). He co-owns a brand of frozen PB&J sandwiches. Next month, he’ll have a cameo role in the film The Mosquito Bowl, playing a World War II drill sergeant who whips Marines into football shape. His talent agent is none other than Ari Emanuel. McAfee, in other words, is even more ubiquitous than ESPN.

Or at least the ESPN of old. For decades, the network offered a predictable and reliable formula. It had rights to the top sports leagues and events; a cast of quick-witted anchors on its flagship shows, especially SportsCenter; dogged journalists who held leagues, athletes, and owners to account; daytime sports-talk shows that were lower budget and higher margin than the other programming. The network has had stars come and go over the years, and more recently it created elevated platforms for Scott Van Pelt and Stephen A. Smith, who rose from the traditional ranks of broadcast and print journalism. But the streaming era has caused the network’s cash cow — the cable bundle — to collapse slowly. By 2023, ESPN had lost more than 25 percent of its audience over the previous decade and more since. The younger generation has been flocking to content creators for sports (and........

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