The University of Utah apologized on Monday to ESPN’s Pat McAfee after a handful of students mocked him as “corny” and “creepy,” triggering the college football personality during his assignment last week to Salt Lake City.
Students had made moderately disparaging remarks about the former Indianapolis Colts punter, which were taped and published on the school’s Instagram, though the footage has since been deleted.
“We sincerely apologize for creating any perception that Pat was unsafe or unwelcome on our campus,” the university said in a statement on social media.
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Pat and the entire GameDay crew are always welcome at the University of Utah and we deeply appreciate the opportunity ESPN provides to showcase our university and community,” the statement said.
McAfee said he wasn’t annoyed by the actual criticism as much as he was by students being allowed to use the university’s platform to make those points.
“One kid goes, ‘Ah, he’s corny.’ Another kid calls me creepy,” the ESPN personality said on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Monday. “OK 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.”
“The university puts that out,” he continued. “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 like, I’m getting a lot of shrapnel from a lot of places. The university is putting this out? That something I just had never experienced really in my entire life.”
McAfee appeared to draw a comparison between himself and right wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, who was gunned down on Sept. 10 last year at Utah Valley University in Orem.
“I thought to myself, did something else happen pretty scary at a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?” McAfee said. “Like, should we be amplifying reasons why people hate my guts? So I don’t know, it was a lot of mixed feelings.”
McAfee is among the most polarizing figures in modern sports media.
Last year he was forced to apologize to a University of Mississippi student after he amplified a false rumor that she was having an affair with her boyfriend’s father.