In lengthy remarks Thursday on his ESPN-platformed show, Pat McAfee defended his practice of paying Aaron Rodgers “handsomely” to make regular appearances.
“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,” said McAfee.
His discussion of the matter with co-host A.J. Hawk and other members of the “Pat McAfee Show” was sparked by the revelation in a New York Post story published earlier in the day that Rodgers doesn’t take the time to engage in weekly conversations simply because he enjoys the banter.
In a text message to the New York Post, McAfee disclosed that he has paid Rodgers over $1 million. The story cited sources in reporting that the star quarterback is getting paid “more than seven figures per year” for his weekly segments.
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McAfee then said on his show that after Rodgers began coming on and generating notable audience interest, McAfee wrote him a check for $450,000 during “one holiday season” and told Rodgers, “It’s nowhere near enough for what you’ve done for us.”
“I give rather large bonuses as thank you’s,” McAfee, 36, told the New York Post, “and I genuinely believe it’s the only way to operate.”
At one point during Thursday’s on-air discussion, a cast member said that paying Rodgers was a matter of “principle,” because the Packers-turned-Jets quarterback has been “a huge part” of making the show “bigger and better.”
To one expert in journalism ethics, though, another principle is that “paying sources is a bad idea, because it tends to taint what you get from them.”
“When you pay a source,” said Kevin Z. Smith, an Ohio University journalism professor who is also a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists and helped shape that organization’s ethics code, “there’s an expectation, even if it’s an unspoken expectation, about what you want from that person.”
In the case of “The Pat McAfee Show,” Rodgers could be well aware that what the hosts want from him is a nugget or two likely to go viral. That was certainly the case on Tuesday, when the 39-year-old quarterback challenged Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who has starred in ads promoting flu and coronavirus vaccines, to a debate over their efficacy. Was Rodgers serious about something he has been pondering in his private time, or, out of a sense of investment in the success of McAfee’s show, did he feel compelled to come armed that day with a tasty sound bite?
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In any event, Smith said, McAfee had an obligation to inform his audience members that “they’re listening to somebody whose opinion has been bought for the purposes of entertainment.” The same would apply, Smith added, to radio programs that pay coaches and prominent athletes for weekly appearances, an arrangement some observers likened Thursday to McAfee’s compensation of Rodgers.
While the NFL career of McAfee, a two-time Pro Bowl selection who punted for the Colts from 2009 to 2016, overlapped with that of Rodgers, they have both said their personal relationship did not burgeon until 2019, when they were on a golf trip together. In an appearance last year on ESPN’s “ManningCast,” Rodgers said he invited McAfee to join his group at the behest of Hawk, a former Green Bay Packers linebacker who became close friends with Rodgers while they were teammates from 2006 to 2014.
After hearing McAfee deliver some of his stand-up comedy routine, Rodgers said, he “knew from that point forward we were going to be good friends.”
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Of subsequently agreeing to become a regular interviewee on McAfee’s show, Rodgers said in a 2021 episode that it allowed him to “silence all the douchebags out there who were talking for me, and either making themselves more relevant by using my name or running with stories that were not really based in any type of fact.”
“This was a great, natural, authentic … [way to] have a conversation,” Rodgers added at the time. “If you know me, this is about as normal an interaction as you’re going to see from me.”
“You did us a massive favor,” McAfee told him then.
Rodgers’s extensive participation has undoubtedly been a boost to McAfee’s show. Over the past year, the quarterback has used his appearances to reveal he was going on a darkness retreat to help clarify his thoughts about possible retirement, and then to announce he wanted to be traded from the Packers to the Jets. Before that, he chose to wade into sociopolitical waters by firing back at a “woke mob” Rodgers said was misguidedly criticizing him for not getting vaccinated against the coronavirus.
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Having signed a reported four-year, $120 million deal in 2021 to have his show sponsored by FanDuel, McAfee jumped in May to ESPN, where he was already working as a college football analyst.
On Thursday, McAfee did not specify when he began paying Rodgers to appear on the show. Declaring that the program had gone from a valuation of “2 to 5 million a few years back to over, like, 500 million dollars,” McAfee said that “the people who have helped that happen have all been paid very handsomely.”
The New York Post reported that Alabama Coach Nick Saban is getting paid in the “neighborhood” of Rodgers’s seven figures to appear every Thursday this fall on McAfee’s show.
“Hopefully, other people will have to pay people for their time at some point, as well,” McAfee said Thursday. “And sorry I’ve ruined your little gimmick of, ‘You’re lucky to get to talk and make our lives a lot easier,’ if that’s what this is, but I am not embarrassed or ashamed of this at all.”
“That is what business is, in my eyes,” said McAfee, who also claimed that Rodgers was initially reluctant to accept financial compensation for his appearances. “That is what you do in the world.”
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