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Pat McAfee currently sits atop the sports media kingdom as the reluctant face of ESPN, where he seemingly gets everything he wants, especially after publicly complaining.
It can be hard to remember that not that long ago he was a Barstool Sports personality.
It probably isn’t very hard to imagine that his time there ended acrimoniously after some public complaining.
McAfee immediately joined Barstool Sports after retiring from the NFL in early 2017, quickly becoming a mainstay across their content empire. However, by August 2018, things had soured, and McAfee announced he was leaving the company. His announcement, while mostly positive about his experience with the company, alluded to financial decisions made without his knowledge that affected him, and he no longer wanted to be part of it.
“I began being disrespected by the business people in the building. I’ve decided I don’t want to make money for these folks anymore,” wrote McAfee on Twitter (now X). “I’m very proud of the work I did with Barstool.
“Financial decisions were being made for me by people I had never met, deals were getting made and pulled without my knowledge. The transparency of everything became obsolete, and also very expensive. I do not place any blame or hold any grudge towards Erika [Nardini] and Dave [Portnoy] for this. They’ve been nothing but nice and fair to me. They paid me very well. This is below them. I began being disrespected by the business people in the building. I don’t want to make money for these folks anymore.”
At the time, Portnoy said that he understood why McAfee had lost faith in Barstool’s sales and accounting departments, but seemed to see it as a more nuanced situation.
“I love and respect Pat,” he wrote. “I begged him to stay, but he’s got to do what he thinks is right for him. He’s a complex dude and he rightfully lost some trust in some of our business folks. Ultimately, that’s my and Erika’s fault.”
In a different post, he wrote, “I certainly wouldn’t say it was intentional. It was a combo of multiple factors, and I see multiple point of views. It’s like when a star feels like management doesn’t respect their contributions.”
In 2025, Portnoy was a bit more succinct about his view of McAfee’s reasoning for leaving, saying, “I think that’s bullsh*t.”
Portnoy is making the rounds this week to promote his new book, “Cancel Me If You Can,” and he discussed McAfee’s 2018 departure in an interview with Front Office Sports’ Ryan Glasspiegel.
“He thought the business side disrespected him, so he felt he had to leave, was his version of events,” said Portnoy. “I think he probably was always going to leave. He’s a super ambitious guy. Super talented guy. But that was the reason he publicly gave—that he couldn’t trust our business side anymore.
“Now, I don’t think our business side did anything wrong. I think he kind of blew it out of proportion, but that is the reason he gave.”
Portnoy then explained exactly what the McAfee-business drama entailed. According to the Barstool owner, McAfee was distrustful of the company’s ad sales department and of the late payments he was receiving. McAfee presumed that ad salespeople were favoring Pardon My Take over his show because their commissions would be larger, which Portnoy says wasn’t the case. And when they tried to smooth things over by assigning one person to work directly with him, that person “ended up quitting and hating our guts, or hating [former Barstool CEO] Erika [Ayers Badan]’s guts,” and his replacement [Louis Roberts] “certainly didn’t help.”
While McAfee has become wildly successful in the years since, it’s never long before he feels the need to lash out at someone for a perceived slight. Looking back, this might have been the inciting incident that told us what we needed to know for the years ahead.
The post Dave Portnoy: Pat McAfee blew reason for leaving Barstool out of proportion appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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