Jon Stettin
Pat McAfee is reportedly making approximately $30 million a year at ESPN and negotiating for considerably more. Depending upon which report you believe, his next agreement could approach $60 million annually. Ryan Clark was reportedly making approximately $2 million a year before ESPN decided it could live without him. Those are not sports media salaries. Those are sports figures’ salaries.
Perhaps that is appropriate, because the people talking about the games have increasingly become more important to the networks than the games they are supposed to be talking about. The opinions are now the event. The argument is the product. The person behind the desk is no longer there to explain what happened. He is there to make sure his reaction to what happened goes viral before the next commercial break. Board rooms think that is high dollar worth.
Sports media did not lose its way overnight. It slowly replaced expertise with personality, personality with performance, and performance with manufactured confrontation. Now it is paying extraordinary amounts of money to the handful of people who can still make an audience feel something. McAfee is an easy target because the numbers are absurd. When ESPN is laying off employees while reportedly negotiating a massive extension with one personality, people are naturally going to connect the two. J.J. Watt joked about it directly on McAfee’s own show, asking whether everybody at ESPN had been fired to pay him. It was funny because the question was close enough to what everyone was already thinking. It was also not entirely fair. Pat McAfee built something. ESPN did not discover him sitting behind an anchor desk in Bristol. It did not manufacture his personality in a production meeting. He created his own audience, developed his own style, assembled his own team, and proved that people would watch him before ESPN ever wrote the check. ESPN did not create Pat McAfee. ESPN purchased access to what Pat McAfee had already created. There is a difference. The most interesting part of the McAfee story is not that ESPN may pay him $60 million a year. It is why ESPN believes it has to. The worldwide leader in sports has more rights, resources, technology, access, production capability and institutional power than almost anyone in sports media. Yet when it needs attention, relevance or a big interview, it increasingly relies upon a personality who built his identity outside the traditional system. That should tell us something.It should also make us ask a very simple question. What happened to sports television?
When Knowing the Game Mattered
I grew up watching people who knew the games. Chris Berman had a personality as large as anyone on television, but beneath the nicknames, sound effects and highlights was someone who understood what he was watching. Tom Jackson did not need to shout over three other people to command attention. He knew football, and when he explained something, you listened. Ron Jaworski could break down a quarterback, a coverage or a missed assignment and teach you something you did not know before the segment began. Who remembers ” let’s go to the videotape?” I certainly do and the man who said it. They were personalities, but their personalities grew from their knowledge. That is a very different thing from hiring personalities and hoping knowledge eventually shows up. SportsCenter was once essential viewing. You did not watch because someone was about to manufacture an argument. You watched because you wanted to know what happened. The hosts were sharp, funny and original, but the games remained the stars of the show.
Today, too much sports television feels like an amateur podcast with a multimillion dollar lighting budget. Everyone has a talking point. Everyone has a rehearsed outrage. Everyone knows when to smile, when to raise a voice and when to pretend the person sitting across from them just said the most ridiculous thing ever heard by another human being.
One person says yes.
The other says no.
Nobody wins. Nothing is learned. Tomorrow they reverse the question and do it again. How many times can the same networks debate whether a star player is great, whether a coach should be fired, whether a quarterback can win the big one, or whether something is bad for somebody’s legacy? Apparently, as many times as there are commercial breaks to sell. The problem is not that sports should never be entertaining. Sports are entertainment. The people covering them should have personalities. They should be funny, provocative, opinionated and occasionally outrageous. But there should be something behind it. There should be experience. There should be judgment. There should be the ability to see something the audience did not already see on social media ten minutes earlier. Most of all, there should be an honest opinion that was not assigned during the morning production meeting.
The Salary Is Not the Real Story
It is easy to blame McAfee, Stephen A. Smith or any other highly compensated personality for the current state of ESPN. That misses the larger point. They did not create the system. They learned how to win inside it. If a network determines that one personality is worth tens of millions of dollars, that is a business decision. If that personality delivers an audience, commands attention and creates value, he has every right to negotiate for whatever the market will pay. The more revealing question is why so few people have become valuable enough to matter. Sports media has quietly adopted the same economic structure as sports themselves. A handful of superstars receive staggering contracts while almost everyone around them becomes replaceable. The difference is that an athlete’s value is usually measurable. He hits the home run, throws the touchdown, makes the shot or wins the race. The scoreboard does not care about the talking points.
Sports television is different. Ratings can be attributed, packaged, interpreted and sold. Clips can accumulate millions of views without creating a loyal audience. Outrage can produce attention without producing trust. A personality can be famous without anyone believing a word he says. The industry learned how to measure whether people looked. It became less concerned with whether they listened. That is not just an ESPN problem. It is happening throughout media. It is also creating an opportunity.
The Ground Is Moving
Horse racing is experiencing its own version of the same upheaval. FanDuel TV, originally launched as TVG in 1999, is being phased out. More than a quarter century of dedicated racing television is disappearing because continuation of the network no longer fits FanDuel’s long term strategy. Think about the contradiction. FanDuel operates one of the most powerful wagering platforms in the country. It benefits financially when people watch races, follow horses and make wagers. Yet maintaining a full television network devoted to racing was still determined not to be worth the cost. That was not merely a programming decision. It was a verdict on the old delivery system.
At virtually the same moment, NYRA and FOX began moving in the other direction. FOX had already committed enormous resources and approximately 1,000 hours of live racing coverage in 2025. When FanDuel announced its departure, NYRA and FOX started exploring how to expand their coverage and help fill the void. We covered FanDuel’s decision critically because it deserved critical coverage. We covered the response from NYRA and FOX favorably because it deserved favorable coverage. That should not be unusual. Apparently, it is. Too much modern sports coverage begins with deciding who the good guys and bad guys are. Every subsequent development is then forced through that decision. If we like an organization, everything it does must be defended. If we dislike it, nothing it does can be credited. That is not analysis. That is allegiance.
The FanDuel and FOX stories show us something larger than what will appear on a racing fan’s television screen. They show that sports media is being redistributed in real time. Some legacy platforms are retreating. Others are expanding. Traditional television, streaming services, independent media, connected television and direct to consumer programming are merging into one marketplace. The audience no longer cares whether a show originated in Bristol, New York, Los Angeles or someone’s spare bedroom.
It cares whether the people talking have anything worth hearing. Roku does not care how large your building is. Apple TV does not care how many executives attended the production meeting. Fire TV does not care whether a host was approved by three departments before expressing an opinion. The screen is the screen. The audience will decide who belongs on it.
Racing Was My Education, Not My Boundary
I have spent more than fifty years studying races, odds, markets, athletes, pressure and human behavior. Horse racing is where I earned my education. It remains my greatest area of expertise, and that is not changing. But racing was never the boundary of what I saw. The same mistakes, tendencies, inflated reputations, public overreactions and hidden advantages exist in every sport. The same people who overbet the famous trainer overbet the famous quarterback. The same people who mistake a horse’s last performance for its true ability mistake one great playoff game for proof that an athlete has suddenly changed.
The uniforms change. The odds change. Human nature does not. Neither does pressure. I have always been fascinated by what happens when talent, money, preparation, ego, public perception and risk meet in the same place. Horse racing taught me how to study that intersection because racing does not allow anyone to hide from the result. You can talk all you want before the gates open. Then they open.
That background creates a different way of looking at sports. Not merely who won or lost, but why. Not merely what everyone saw, but what they missed. Not merely what someone said, but why he needed to say it. That is where the best sports conversations live. Not in another scripted argument about legacy. Not in four people shouting over one another. Not in waiting for the approved talking point to arrive through an earpiece. In the part of the story that was not obvious.
There Is Room for Something Different
Perhaps the next great sports show will not come from a network conference room. Perhaps it will come from people who built their audience the hard way. People who know their subjects, have lived what they discuss and are willing to say what they believe without waiting for permission. Maybe the audience is ready for sports coverage that can be entertaining without being insulting. Opinionated without being scripted. Provocative without being manufactured. Funny without becoming foolish. Maybe people still want to hear from someone who knows the difference between having a take and understanding the game.
Past the Wire was built in horse racing, one of the most difficult, complicated and unforgiving sports and wagering markets in the world. We learned to survive by seeing what others missed, saying what others would not and earning trust one reader and one viewer at a time. We are proud of that foundation. We are also not finished building.
The ground beneath sports media is moving. The old walls are coming down. What was once controlled by a few networks is becoming available to anyone capable of earning an audience and keeping it. That does not make the competition easier. It makes the opportunity larger.
I have never been interested in talking simply to hear myself talk. I want to see something others missed, explain something others cannot, and occasionally say the thing everyone else in the room knows but is afraid to say. Sports media could use more of that right now. Something new is coming.
And if I am going to play, I am not showing up to participate. I am showing up to win.
