We live in the golden age of rich and powerful people lack the ability to handle even the slightest criticism, and few people embody that ethos as much as Pat McAfee.
College GameDay spent its second consecutive weekend in Utah, landing in Salt Lake City on Saturday for the Big 12 showdown between the Utah Utes and Houston Cougars. The show kicked off with McAfee giving people what they apparently want: taking off his shirt and, once again, chastising The New York Timesover a column in The Athletic about his outsized impact on the show.
That’s normal McAfee pettiness, but the way the show ended caught people’s attention.
“We appreciate all the love from everybody that camped out and hung out and came out to hang out with us,” said McAfee as he prepared to announce his Utah-Houston pick. “The fireworks at the beginning were special.
“Now I will say the person who won the kicking raffle said $1 million wasn’t enough, and then they would go on to miss. The university’s Instagram account posted something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love.
“It’s hard to pick against this mighty Utah student section, but I’m gonna do it ten times out of ten. Give me Houston coming out of here with a big-time dub and proving that Utah hasn’t had to play anybody yet. They’re going to get a little bit of a struggle, and then maybe they get better down the stretch. Congrats to Houston getting a huge win here in Salt Lake City.
“Thank you, guys. I’ll neversee you again, hopefully.”
Utah beat Houston, for what it’s worth, but you didn’t have to parse too much language to understand that McAfee was peeved with the fine folks at the University of Utah.
It certainly wasn’t the first time McAfeehas gotten into a public feudwith a college football fanbase, but it didn’t become clear how annoyed the former NFL punter was with the school and its fans until Monday’s episode of The Pat McAfee Show.
“I’ve really enjoyed this college football season. Did not enjoy University of Utah,” McAfee said during Monday’s show. “Did not enjoy it.”
“You know why I didn’t like it mostly? Right before I go out there, okay, right before I go out there, I see the University of Utah’s Instagram page, okay?… They put out a video, can you do an impression of Pat McAfee? And one kid goes, ‘Ah, he’s corny.’ Another kid calls me creepy. Okay, if these kids would have done this on their own blogs, all good. I mean, everybody’s taking shots at me anyways for everything. I get it. If the two ladies that were hosting that put that out on their own blog, I’d be okay with it. Hey, you, you’re allowed to do what you— the university puts that out? Like, as I’m about to go out and do an infomercial for the place, and then I’m walking in front of thousands of these people, this is how the university feels about it?
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling… I’m getting a lot of shrapnel from a lot of places. The university is putting this out. That is something I just had never experienced really in my entire life. So it kind of set me off a little bit. It made me feel a little bit weird, I would say. Made me feel a little bit weird.”
The video in question was made by Utah Student Experience in conjunction with the official University of Utah account, which is distinct from McAfee’s understanding that the university itself made it. In the video, which has since been deleted from both the Instagram and TikTok accounts, several Utah students clowned McAfee for being corny while camping out overnight for GameDay, fairly benign stuff for anyone who has seen what many other people say about McAfee online. It was part of a seriesof videos featuring students and the atmosphere leading up to the GameDay appearance on their campus.
This is the video the University of Utah posted on Instagram that people claim turned Pat McAfee against Utah.
They’re calling him a creep for taking his shirt off… (when the entire crowd was chanting for him to do it???) https://t.co/rvs9FWz2TD
— Bill (@Billgetzfroggy) October 24, 2026
At this point, McAfee made an allusion to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, last September, in what appeared to be an attempt to draw a parallel between a video of college students making fun of him and a right-wing political activist being killed.
“And then I thought to myself, has anything like really scary happened at like a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?” asked McAfee. “Like, do we think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university? I don’t know.”
McAfee has previously made comments on air and on X comparing his situation to Kirk’s assassination.
McAfee then noted his frustration with the Utah student who participated in his field-goal kicking contest on Saturday. She seemed to offend McAfee by noting that last week’s BYU kicking contest offered a chance to win $3 million instead of the $1 million she was playing for. The ESPN analyst said earlier in the show that his billionaire friend, Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith, pitched in last week but didn’t this time, which is why the amount was lower.
“It was a lot of mixed feelings for me going out there. And then obviously the kicker goes, ‘Only $1 million? Only $1 million?’ It’s like, all right, I hate this place. I hate this place,” he continued. “They got a good football team, though. They got a good football team. But I’ve never been more uncomfortable, honestly, in my life walking in front of a group of people after watching their university put out a post basically dogging me just moments before.”
McAfee added that what made it so offensive to him was that the official school social media accounts posted it, which, to him, is different from presumably much harsher criticism elsewhere.
“I’ll hopefully never go to that place,” he said. “I think I have COVID or something whenever GameDay goes back, if I’m still a part of GameDay. But I, I did not enjoy the morning there… Just didn’t like the university taking a shot at me.
“New York Times, do what you got to do. I guess, I guess you kill me. All the sports media tabloids, people, they quote me out of context. They build a narrative about me. But you got people that really hate my guts out there, like really hate my guts. And I understand it. I guess this is just a part of what life is, especially because I have a lot of things that are very hateable about me. I could certainly understand that. But the university gaslighting some of it right before I go out there to talk about your school, especially with what happened 40 miles south of Salt Lake City a little over a year ago. I did not enjoy that.
“I was very, very uncomfortable. I was just very, very uncomfortable.”
McAfee later shared that he saw the Utah social media clip right before they went on air and gave Kirk Herbstreit a heads-up about his mood to start the show.
“I just thought to myself, f*ck this place,” McAfee said. “I walked up to that set and uh, you know ‘I think I hate this place. I think I hate this place,’ and Herbie is like, ‘What? Why?'”
“I saw this like moments before we go up there, and I was like, ‘Is this from the University of Utah? Like the actual university’s account?’ Yeah. Okay, you could have edited out a couple of those things out. I don’t think you needed to go with those two things did you? Unless….okay….you don’t like me.”
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