Pat McAfee is right to pay Aaron Rodgers, but it’s still messy

A report emerged on Thursday that ESPN’s Pat McAfee is paying Aaron Rodgers to appear on The Pat McAfee Show each week to discuss his life in football, and spread his brand of misinformation, which stirred up discussion of the nature and ethics of the show.

McAfee addressed the issue head-on, confirming that he’s absolutely paying Rodgers, and that he sees it simply as a way to share the wealth his show is generating. The host added that one holiday season he cut a check for $450,000 to Rodgers, as a way of showing his appreciation for pushing his show into the stratosphere.

McAfee is incredibly polarizing in the sports landscape. Personally, I don’t care for his style of show or his appearances on College Gameday, not because I dislike the man, but because his belief in self-promotion above all else only serves to help Pat McAfee, and not his viewers — and my belief has always been that the role of media is to serve their readers, listeners and watchers above all else. That said, it’s damn near impossible to argue with the ESPN host when he frames his payments to Rodgers like this:

“As someone who didn’t come from a lot of money. As someone who watched my dad work his dick off and get a $500 bonus, potentially at Christmas, when the company he was working for, and the company he was busting his ass for was thriving — and we were still wondering if we were going to get Christmas presents whenever Christmas comes around. I have always had the view of ‘If someone is going to make money for us, that person is going to reap the benefit from it. [...] If you believe humans should work their dicks off for you and not get paid for it, like, you’re a massive part of the problem as well.”

There’s absolutely no denying that Rodgers’ appearance on PMS pushed it to the stratosphere. It was the greatest organic marketing in sports media. At a time where everyone was desperate to know what the quarterback would do next, McAfee had the access everyone craved, and not even the most vaunted of NFL insiders knew what No. 12 was going to do like McAfee did.

Without Rodgers it’s almost impossible to imagine McAfee reaching a place where he’d be offered an $85 million deal from ESPN. That said, there are some really complicated elements to this that we’d be remiss in not discussing.

It might not be as a brazen as directly cutting a check, but there is a disgusting amount of quid pro quo in sports media that hit the stratosphere with the rise of “insider” culture. This is when some traditional sports journalists pivoted away from spending time to uncover a story in favor of becoming extensions of teams and agents in exchange for getting scoops.

A large reasons for this is the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the immediacy needed to be first on a story, but it’s brazenly obvious when Adam Schefter is parroting an agent’s statement on his Twitter account, or (like he’s been caught for in the past) sharing written copy with a team so they can choose what to strike from it.

If someone is routinely breaking every story in a sport it’s not because of journalistic skill, it’s because they’ve done a lot of work to cultivate relationships with teams and agents, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep those relationships intact.

So, at the very least, McAfee is saying “yeah, I’m getting exclusives on my show from Rodgers — so I’m paying for them.” It’s more intellectually honest than pretending there’s hightened skill in blurring the line between media and public relations.

It’s not exactly a new concept that people in power want to control the message. Journalists have always been a profound annoyance to people in charge, because they speak truth to power and make it their mission to communicate complicated concepts to the masses.

A free press is unquestionably one of the greatest freedoms any country can have, and it’s wonderful that every day presidents and politicians are asked difficult questions in free nations to ensure some accountability — and to keep citizens informed.

The issue in paying a subject (or any of these quid pro quo deals) is that it innately restricts the flow of information. Would Aaron Rodgers appear on The Pat McAfee Show if Pat was asking him tough questions he didn’t want to answer? Would agents continue to feed Schefter information if he presented it objectively, and not with a specific slant relevant to their motives?

Press conferences, locker room media access, and league-mandated access exists to support a free press. One of the most soul-crushing things to hear as a sports fan and writer is when people say “Why should they have to answer questions? I can just go directly to their Instagram or Twitter.”

That’s great if you never, ever want to learn anything of substance. If you want heavily filtered, superficial information that highlights the good, and never the bad — then by all means, consume media that way. Just don’t pretend that a direct line to an athlete via social media is the equivalent of having a journalist ask probing questions.

Paying Aaron Rodgers for being a huge reason why your show took over is unquestionably a noble thing to do. We live in an era where corporate CEOs clear multi-million bonuses while low-level workers a left with the crumbs, and in its own way this is appreciative of the time Rodgers puts into appearing every week on PMS.

Still, it’s off putting to give Rodgers a platform like this under the guise of it actually being an “interview,” when it’s a paid appearance. I’m sure most viewers of PMS believed that Rodgers’ appearance were based on him liking McAfee, and that’s certainly true — but the dynamic changes when cash is changing hands.

McAfee has a vested interest not to bite the hand that feeds with Rodgers. He won’t challenge him, or push back — even when that comes to Rodgers touting conspiracy theories, giving him the freedom to only tell his side of any story, or quip that Travis Kelce is “Mr. Pfizer” for being in favor of Covid vaccinations.

People tuned in to McAfee this Spring to see where Rodgers might end up. Now that’s morphed into the quarterback being given a huge platform to spread misinformation, back RFK Jr. for president, or whatever pops into his head that week.

Any other outlet would move off Rodgers and give airtime to something currently relevant to sports, but now McAfee is beholded to continue his pay-for-play, because you never know when he might need Rodgers’ ratings next time.

The only winners in all this are Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers. The rest of us are along for their moneymaking ride.