ESPN star Pat McAfee is pretty obsessive about the idea he might be killed on the set of College Gameday or somewhere else. I say that descriptively rather than pejoratively. It’s an odd, dark aspect of his output that’s arguably as much related to the time we live in as it is to his own narcissistic idiosyncrasies.
I see it as an underrated subplot of a man whose sudden power at ESPN generates a lot of commentary. I was vaguely aware of his worry, but before looking into it, didn’t realize just how often he’s expressed concern about being struck down like this. When McAfee lashes out at an anodyne University of Utah video making fun of him, as he did last weekend, it’s natural to call the GameDay host “soft.” When he invokes the murder of another public figure on a Utah campus in response, he is indeed acting unreasonably.
At the same time, it’s hard to dismiss McAfee’s job, silly as it is, as completely safe. It reminds me of that famous Catch-22 line, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Pat McAfee acts paranoid, more so than any ESPN celebrity, as I’ll detail below. It’s also difficult, in 2026, to reject his paranoia as purely irrational. He’s not an overtly political public figure, but he does have something of a political valence. The world has sharper corners than it did in the decades when Lee Corso had this gig. Here are McAfee’s expressed fears, both reasonable and unreasonable, along with why ESPN can’t simply shrug them off.