Pat McAfee's production deal with ESPN is worth $60 million a year, against about $20 million a year for Stephen A. Smith, and Jon Kelly's argument is that the gap is not about talent at all — it is that one of them owns the business and the other is on salary.
The easy reading of McAfee is a loud personality who got expensive. Kelly's reading is that ESPN is using him to prove an industrial point: that a shrinking number of individual names will take an increasing share of distribution, even as the audience for everything else splinters.
"Fewer high-performing talent are going to absorb more of the distribution stream even as the culture continues to fragment."
Kelly co-founded Puck and is its editor-in-chief, which makes him both an analyst of this shift and one of the people running a business built on it; Peter Hamby books him every Monday to go through the week in media.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 22 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 insights that matter.
👤 Guest: Jon Kelly, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Puck, and an executive producer of this show
🎙️ Host: Peter Hamby, who writes about politics and media for Puck and hosts The Powers That Be
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on YouTube (Puck)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 22 min | ✅ Time saved: 9 min
Key Takeaways
The $60M deal buys a business, not a person, and that is the whole difference from Stephen A. Smith's $20M
McAfee owns his show and licenses it to ESPN; Smith is paid to appear on a set number of programs
A shrinking number of names will take a growing share of distribution while the culture fragments
The same pattern shows up at MS NOW, where one morning program grew into about a fifth of the daily schedule
One on-air talent got the network's last programming head fired by criticizing him on his own show
College GameDay's ratings case for McAfee is demographic, not total audience
Viewership among women rose 34% and the under-25 audience rose 35% last season
The ceiling on an independent creator's business is the absence of a second star
Nobody at that level has built shoulder talent; the closest comparison is Barstool, and Kelly's is Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions
MS NOW's subscription is aimed at people who never had cable, not at the people who just cut it
Streaming and events revenue will not replace what cable pays, and the gap is not close
The Bulwark, the model everyone cites, is reported to make around $20 million
1. Two ESPNs in One Week
Hamby opened on what he framed as two incompatible versions of the same network appearing days apart.
His framing: "Last week, we saw two very different versions of the most trusted name in sports." One was the coverage after Barry Melrose died following a battle with Parkinson's, with a parade of longtime ESPN faces coming on to pay tribute on Scott Van Pelt's SportsCenter
"It was moving and sweet and he was a staple of the network for so many years," Hamby said
The other was Pat McAfee at the center of the College GameDay table in Baton Rouge for LSU's win over Clemson, where Lane Kiffin — under fire, in Hamby's telling, for pushing the boundaries of recruiting — thanked McAfee on air for his advice, and Nick Saban sat off to the side rolling his eyes
McAfee then led the crowd in an obscene chant, live on Saturday morning television
A senior media executive at a rival network texted Puck's John Ourand about it: "But is it not that cool for Pat McAfee to lead that chant on TV on a Saturday morning? Does anyone at ESPN want to explain how edgy and hilarious that is?" The executive prefaced it by saying he might just be a prude
Hamby's answer was that the executive was being exactly that, and that the standard he was appealing to does not survive the year on the calendar
On why he does not mind: "That's what makes LSU cool. They have culture there. Other college teams have lame tailgates," he said, reporting that his own friends were in the Baton Rouge tailgate from noon until the rain delay and "People were pretty bourbon soaked"
His summary of the man himself: "McAfee is a character that has emerged at ESPN, highly paid, who is obviously controversial, but he is at the center of attention and represents the new ESPN" — a show ESPN licenses rather than makes
2. The $60M Leverage Point
Kelly's answer moved straight from the personality to the industrial logic, and the deal is the evidence rather than the subject.
McAfee is expanding — through college football, and now onto Monday Night Football — on a $60 million a year production deal that lets him take more money out personally while also paying his team more and funding production values
The brand-safety objection is real, Kelly said, and he did not dismiss it: "Traditionally sponsors and clients do care, right? Like the brand safety element is real on a lot of these shows." Blue-chip advertisers go to sports precisely because it is monocultural and largely safe, and in different hands the behavior would cost him
What he thinks ESPN is actually doing with him is bigger than one show: using McAfee as a leverage point for a broader media-industry narrative of consolidating time around a diminishing number of individual talents
The parallel he reached for is MS NOW, where Morning Joe grew into something like 20% of the daily programming slate and its hosts were, at one point, eating five hours of live television
McAfee now takes two hours a day Monday to Friday on ESPN, simulcast with his YouTube show, and is moving into weekend prime time and live events because "he is individually an audience aggregator"
The thesis in one line: "Fewer high-performing talent are going to absorb more of the distribution stream even as the culture continues to fragment."
"And they're paying him $60 million because Jimmy Pitaro, the chairman of ESPN, recognizes that there are a very limited number of Pat McAfee," he said
The proof of the power is a firing: "I mean to prove your point, like Pat McAfee got the last programming head of ESPN fired because he was talking about him negatively on his show. That's extraordinary power. That's like '90s film star power getting the studio head canned."
Kelly's forecast is that the deal will look small rather than large: "And I actually think that in retrospect, these McAfee deals are going to look quaint. We're going to see individual creators just continue to grow and expand their footprint." The comparison he ends on is not a broadcaster — "He's more of an Alex Cooper than he is a Stephen A. Smith"
3. Work All the Time, No Shame
The two of them agreed on what the job actually requires, in an exchange of about ten words.
Hamby: "He has what you need, and Stephen A has this, too, to command that kind of money."
Kelly's answer came in two parts, "Which is work all the time," and then, "And have no shame, right? Just be loud."
Hamby's follow-up was the obvious one: plenty of people in the sports universe would take a $60 million licensing deal, so what separates McAfee from another yapper — Dave Portnoy, who has his own business and appears on Fox sometimes, was the comparison he offered
4. Owner vs Salary Man
This is the section that answers the question, and Kelly's answer is structural rather than about ability.
The two deals are not the same kind of thing: "It's not an annual contract fee the way Stephen A. Smith makes about 20 million bucks a year on ESPN, right? He is a paid talent." Smith is paid to appear on a set number of episodes, shows and special editions
Kelly thinks that deal has dated badly — "I think the Stephen A deal does not age well, right?" — pointing to ESPN having to remake the NBA broadcast and buy out the TNT talent because Smith could not carry critical prime-time moments on his own
Hamby interrupted to say the structure was a choice rather than a constraint: Smith has a YouTube show and a podcast, and the deal could have been built differently, "unless he just is very thirsty for that car service and wants to be on set every morning yapping on ESPN Get Up"
Kelly's framing is that the two men are in inverted businesses: "McAfee owns his business and became a creator and ESPN licenses it." Smith, by contrast, is a salary man who dabbles on the side
"So they're very different economic incentives which I think explain the output," he said — McAfee is incentivized to grow a business, Smith to collect the cash
The right comparison, in his view, is a production company rather than an anchor: "The closer comp for McAfee is Omaha," meaning Peyton Manning's operation, which has several deals at ESPN including the ManningCast and Peyton's Places
What Pitaro is buying is two hours of daily prime time, which Kelly called a lot of tonnage — worth many millions, providing weight to College GameDay, the network's second-biggest franchise behind Monday Night Football
The advertiser effect runs the opposite way to the brand-safety worry: "And counterintuitively, even if he is like, you know, swearing into the wind in Baton Rouge, he creates advertiser excitement." The deal pays out on tonnage and on marketing, and a higher rate is what lets McAfee expand
5. Nobody Builds a Second Star
Hamby's pushback is that the model has a ceiling, and that every independent creator who has reached this altitude has hit the same one.
McAfee is still the star of his own company, and the creators at that zenith — he named Alex Cooper, Ben Shapiro and, as the most recent to go out on his own, Josh Allen — have all had trouble scaling past themselves and finding other stars
Joe Rogan, he conceded, is not the perfect example
The closest thing that has worked is Barstool, where Dave Portnoy found other stars who are, in Hamby's words, probably lesser stars
What gets McAfee to a $100 million annual deal, if he wants one, is not being the only name on the enterprise — it is shoulder talent who can fill the other half-hours and windows
The bigger observation he takes from the deal is about the network rather than the man: ESPN is now completely comfortable licensing its windows. So much of what it airs is licensed sports rights that the company's own product is effectively the programming built around them, and McAfee is licensed on the same terms
That is a long way from a vertically integrated entertainment industry, and Hamby called it "it's a very fascinating hybrid moment in media" — companies patching things together opportunistically, of a piece with the cost-cutting at Disney a Puck colleague had written about that Friday morning
6. GameDay's Demo Numbers
Before the break, Hamby gave what he called the money maker for linear television, out of Kelly's own reporting in Puck's The Varsity.
College GameDay debuted in 1987 — "We miss you Lee Corso," Hamby added — and last season, with McAfee promoted to the middle of the table, it posted its highest ever viewership, up 22% from the 2024 season
He noted Nielsen had changed some of its metrics over that period
The numbers ESPN executives actually noticed were the demographics: "Viewership among women was up 34%," and the under-25 audience for the show jumped 35%
"Like for television, that is massive," he said
His account of how that lands inside the building: "And if you are an executive at ESPN, that is pinned to your wall. It's on the whiteboard and you look at it every day." Against a number like that, the chant is a price worth paying
7. MS NOW's $7.99 Bet
The second block was the subscription product MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler — a former CNN colleague of Hamby's — had just described to Puck's Dylan Byers.
The price is the first fact: "It's going to be cheap, $7.99 a month for a bunch of offerings."
Hamby's case for it is that MS NOW has something CNN does not — personalities whose partisan loyalists will pay. He pointed to The Bulwark and Pod Save America as very different business structures that have built strong businesses on partisan loyalty, and said MS NOW can monetize people who will pay for extras from Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow or Jen Psaki
He was careful about the size of it: "Again, it's not going to save the TV business, but you know, I think Versant in general has been smart about adding revenue streams here and there"
The network is already licensing its own windows the way ESPN does, Kelly noted: "Crooked media shows occupy a lot of their weekend programming and they're looking to the internet for creator voices at the same time they have like you know Rachel Maddow making whatever bonkers money she still makes from that contract a few years ago"
8. Not a Second CNN Plus
Kelly's view is that the product has been miscast by everyone reading it against the last attempt at this.
There is still a real pall cast by CNN Plus, he said, and the first iteration of that was rolled out with a certain grandiosity. "This is not the same thing." He praised both Kutler and Versant's Mark Lazarus as smart and thoughtful about what is ahead
The target is not the diehard cord-cutter. It is the person seeing clips of Money Power Politics or Morning Joe or Psaki on YouTube who wants a little bit more, which is why "So, it's very additive without adding a lot of cost."
The cost structure is the difference from the last attempt: "The costs are de minimis," because nobody is being paid more, whereas CNN Plus was producing entire original shows with its existing anchors. Kelly called it a phantom network; Hamby called it "a whole B side of the record"
"I am definitely cautiously optimistic that it's worth a flyer," Kelly said
The caveat is the one that matters for the parent company: subscriptions and the events business will never make up for the cable fees. Between the hundreds of millions in profit the cable network currently makes and what a digital business earns there is a large gap — the reference point he used is The Bulwark, whose co-founder Sarah Longwell was reported in an Inc. article to have described the company as profitable at around $20 million
Kutler's own case, in his account, is that MS NOW is personality-driven rather than news — which he called a distinction CNN has struggled with, because its news streaming service and its weather app are both more commodity products
His conclusion is that none of this is decided by the content: "at the end of the day all this comes down to distribution." What makes it sink or swim is integration into Amazon Prime channels and using YouTube as a discovery platform that converts, with content cheap enough to make and monetize
"I think this is going to be about like can they do distribution deals with Walmart," he said, against an older world in which you made a great show and the ratings followed
Hamby's name for that strategy is the Cheddar playbook, and Kelly — a former Cheddar talent — agreed that John Steinberg minted it, putting the channel in front of captive audiences on university campuses and selling the vision hard to advertisers before getting out at the right time
Bonus Insights
Hamby's closing argument is generational rather than financial: someone who is 30 and has never had cable does not see MS NOW in a constellation with CNN, CNBC and Fox News. They see it in a feed next to The Bulwark, Courier Newsroom, Pod Save America and independent creators, and the question is what extra goodies convert that
His version of who the customer is not: the mother watching the channel who might open a laptop and hand over a credit card. The customer is on a phone
The Melrose tribute and the McAfee chant were not presented as a complaint about decline. Hamby's point was that both are ESPN now, and the network is comfortable with that
Kelly's aside on how far McAfee's money goes was that he is probably never flying commercial again
Kelly's bottom line is that a licensing deal with an owner-operator is the shape media companies are converging on, at ESPN and at MS NOW alike, and that the economics of the next decade favor the few names big enough to aggregate an audience on their own.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
ESPN and The Pat McAfee Show (The network licenses the show rather than producing it, on a $60 million a year production deal, and has moved it from College GameDay into Monday Night Football)
Puck (Kelly's own publication; John Ourand's reporting on the McAfee deal and Dylan Byers' interview with MS NOW's president are both the basis for the episode)
Omaha Productions (Peyton Manning's company, which Kelly says is the closer comparison for McAfee's arrangement than any on-air contract)
Barstool Sports (The one independent creator business Hamby says has found additional stars, though he calls them lesser ones)
MS NOW and Versant (The rebranded cable network and its parent, launching a $7.99 a month membership aimed at people who never had cable)
The Bulwark (The benchmark for a business built on partisan loyalty, and the number Kelly uses to size the gap against cable profits)
Crooked Media (Its shows occupy a lot of MS NOW's weekend programming, the same window-licensing model ESPN uses)
Courier Newsroom (One of the outlets Hamby says a cord-never sees in the same feed as MS NOW content)
Cheddar (The distribution-first playbook Hamby names for what MS NOW has to do, which Kelly watched being sold from the inside)
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