Pat McAfee offered to pay some of College GameDay's costs when ESPN was mulling budget cuts, Kirk Herbstreit has revealed. Andrew Wevers-Imagn Images

Pat McAfee offered to pay ESPN College GameDay costs amid budget cuts, Kirk Herbstreit reveals

Originally posted on CFB-HQ on SI | By James Parks | Last updated Jul 7, 2025 10:42 AM ET

During a time when ESPN was faced with budget cuts, Pat McAfee personally stepped in by offering to pay for some of College GameDay’s costs by himself.

That’s according to fellow GameDay host Kirk Herbstreit, who recalled when McAfee tried to intervene in order to save some of the program’s segments at risk of being cut by paying for them himself.

“Budget is always a big thing in our industry and trying to cut back on certain things, and they made an announcement that they were going to cut back on this and cut back on that,” Herbstreit said on the Next Man Up podcast.

“And we were on a Zoom and Pat was listening to that, even I was listening to that, like, ‘Why are they cutting back on that? That doesn’t make any sense.’

“And Pat decided to say, ‘Okay, if you’re going to cut back on that, I’ll cover that. I’ll cover that. Because the crew, the people around the show, they need to have that. They need to have that.”

Herbstreit said that McAfee’s offer caught some of the ESPN brass off-guard to the extent that they reconsidered the cuts.

“Upper management heard that and they said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.’ We don’t need Pat to cover that. We’ll take care of that,” he said.

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McAfee’s presence on College GameDay has always caused a reaction of some sort, whether it be his legion of supporters or his vocal detractors.

By bringing him on, ESPN looked to provide a new injection of energy into its most important college football show as veteran analyst Lee Corso stepped back into a more minor role in the years since suffering the stroke that partially impaired his speech.

And it has been expected that he would further embrace a leading role on the program after Corso announced he will leave the show after Week 1 of this coming football season.

But college football fans have been of very different opinions over McAfee’s often bombastic and over-the-top presence on the show.

A poll taken by The Athletic two football seasons ago showed 48.9 percent of over 3,000 respondents disapproved of him, while 30.1 percent said they liked him, and 21 percent had no opinion.

ESPN has clearly sided with the 30 percent, signing him to a new deal last offseason, and maybe hearing about his commitment to the show will help bump those numbers up in the future.