Pat McAfee Has Cut Aaron Rodgers From His Show For Remainder of The Season
NY Post - The ESPN host announced at the start of “The Pat McAfee Show” on Wednesday that the Jets quarterback has made his final appearance of the season.
“There will be a lot of people who are happy with that, myself included to be honest with you,” McAfee said. “The way it ended, it got really loud. I am happy that he’s not going to be in my mentions going forward, which is great news.”
Rodgers was originally scheduled to appear throughout the playoffs, The Post’s Andrew Marchand reported.
Having one of the best, most polarizing starting quarterbacks in the NFL do a weekly spot on your sports talk show seems like a great idea. Rodgers was with a new team. This NFL season was supposed to be centered around the resurgence of the New York Jets now that they had a living, breathing human at quarterback (as opposed to Zach Wilson). Everybody would look forward to Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers talking ball every Tuesday while A.J. Hawk stared blankly into the camera without uttering a word.
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Who wouldn't want that for their show? But then Aaron Rodgers got hurt on the first drive of his Jets career. It was the worst September 11th New Yorkers have experienced in over 2 decades. But the show must go on. Rodgers initial post-injury appearance did crazy numbers I'm sure. It certainly was all over social media. The Aaron Rodgers weekly spot still had legs. The Jets even hung around .500 for the first part of the season. So Rodgers could still come on the Pat McAfee Show, talk a little football, give us some insight on the relationship between him and Zach Wilson, and play make believe that the Jets still might make the playoffs. Everything was going swimmingly. Even when the Jets started to suck, Aaron Rodgers was still doing his whole, "Look at me throw the football, I'm better than science, I'm coming back this year" thing. That gave the show good enough fodder for a few more weeks.
But once that was over and it became clear that Rodgers was not coming back to the team in any meaningful way, things got a little off-the-rails. That's the problem with a guy like Aaron Rodgers. Once you run out of football talk he's going to start speaking his mind. He's going to let you know about things he fancies himself an expert on. He's going to wax poetically about whatever new conspiracy theory Joe Rogan is pushing. He's going to get political. And eventually he's going to insinuate that Jimmy Kimmel is a pedophile and use your platform to get into a public pissing match with the late night talk show host. In hindsight, once Rodgers got injured, there was no way this ever wasn't going to happen.
You've all seen the clips by now. Barstool has blogged their beef a million times. It's one of those stories where everybody (myself included) says, "Holy shit nobody cares", yet still does numbers every time it's written about. To be fair, that's half of what goes up on Barstool, but Jimmy Kimmel vs Aaron Rodgers was the epitome of that for me.
Considering Pat McAfee and ESPN are in a pissing match of their own, part of me is surprised he didn't insist on keeping the Aaron Rodgers hits going, and intentionally try to get him rolling on whatever controversial topics he wants to pontificate on just to fuck with ESPN. But I guess in the end it wasn't worth the headache. Considering McAfee has creative control & control of guest booking on his show, people are speculating that cutting Rodgers was his own personal decision. He doesn't want to deal with the shit that comes with letting Aaron Rodgers talk unfiltered live on camera.
“Aaron Rodgers is a Hall of Famer, a four-time MVP, a massive piece of the NFL story whenever you go back and tell it he will be a huge part of it,” McAfee said. “We are very lucky to get the chance to chat with him and learn from him, some of his thoughts and opinions do piss off a lot of people.
“I am pumped that will no longer be every single Wednesday of my life, which it has been the past few weeks. On Friday, obviously, I threw us into the fire as well. Forever, stand by that. Everything else, though, just can’t do that and not what we want to be known for.”
Hell of a run they had together this year. Plenty of noteworthy moments and viral clips came out of their Tuesday interviews. I'm sure he'll be back on the Pat McAfee show soon enough. But maybe only book him when you actually have something you want to speak with him about. You can't keep giving Aaron Rodgers brain a full week to prepare what he wants to say. That's not good for anybody.