Pat McAfee ended his daily ESPN show on Wednesday by finally addressing the role he played in ruining a college student's reputation. To nobody's surprise, he was extremely annoying about it.
Back in February, McAfee used his show to amplify a rumor about Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett having an affair with her boyfriend's dad. The rumor had already gone viral on social media, with Cornett's name attached, and McAfee's decision to discuss it on air—during an interview with NFL insider Adam Schefter, of all people—made things much worse for her. Cornett's phone number was posted online, her mother's house was swatted, and she received so many threats that she had to switch to online courses and move into emergency housing.
How do you apologize for contributing to something like that? McAfee, perhaps the last person on Earth who still deploys the phrase "girl dad" unironically, decided to communicate his contrition in his usual self-aggrandizing style. Foregoing his formal apology sleeves for a more casual half-sleeve look, McAfee spent the last few minutes of Wednesday's episode reading a prepared statement about the role he played in Cornett's crisis.
"I think you all know from tuning into this program that I never want to be a source of negativity, or contribute to another human's suffering," McAfee said. "And I can now happily share with you that I recently got to meet Mary Kate and her family, and I got a chance to sincerely apologize to them and acknowledge that what I said about Mary Kate was based solely on what others were saying on the internet, or had been previously reported by others, and that we had no personal knowledge about Mary Kate or her personal life."
It gets worse: "As a girl dad, I also was very thankful for the opportunity to let Mr. Cornett know that I was wildly regretful for the part that our show, our program, played in his daughter Mary Kate's pain."
Everything irritating about McAfee can be found in this three-minute clip. Instead of just reading an apology and taking his lumps for being flatly wrong, McAfee has to turn the whole thing into a performance about what a good and noble person he is. He has to remind us that he's a father of a daughter, the kind of honorable man who waits to apologize until he can do it in person, and someone who thinks his show can "make the world a happier place, a better place to celebrate life, and sports, and unify folks." This is crisis management as performed by someone who thinks that watching Ted Lasso qualifies as therapy.
I've lost count of the number of times that McAfee has had to dedicate a portion of one of his shows to apologizing for something stupid or legally actionable that happened on a previous episode. You might assume that at some point, this parade of fuckups would pierce through McAfee's self-conception and suggest that he stop being so fucking pleased with himself, but that kind of introspection would require him to actually be the kind of person he so insistently presents himself as. The reality is that he's just a thoughtless moron, and that's not going to change no matter how many times he mentions his daughter or refers to people as "humans."
