It’s open season on ‘College GameDay’

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This originally appeared in Wednesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.

On the first Tuesday in November, with control of Congress riding on the evening’s returns, Morning Joe carved out a couple of minutes to adjudicate the state of College GameDay.

The tangent began with Willie Geist promoting Saban, ESPN’s six-part docuseries produced by his sister Libby Geist, until Joe Scarborough wondered aloud whether anyone at the table wanted to get in trouble, then volunteered to tear into Pat McAfee. Scarborough went down the GameDay desk with effusive praise for Nick Saban, Rece Davis, Desmond Howard, and Kirk Herbstreit, then lamented that every one of them is being eclipsed by ESPN’s “insatiable desire to give this guy more time.”

It’s election day in America, and Morning Joe spent over two minutes discussing the country’s most pressing issue: Pat McAfee ruining College GameDay

“I don’t know if they haven’t gotten the message yet, but the manosphere that we all thought was brought in in ’24, it may get washed aside”

Jonathan Lemire quipped that Scarborough’s timing could hardly have been better, since an Athletic push alert questioning whether GameDay still works in its current form had arrived on his phone moments earlier. That alert was heralding Will Leitch’s latest column, which landed less than three weeks after Jerry Brewer contended in the same publication that GameDay has relinquished its standing as the Saturday morning ritual every fanbase could call its own — much to the dismay of the former Indianapolis Colts punter.

Leitch likens the McAfee era to MrBeast’s attention-harvesting empire, where the only discernible objective is making the number go up, and argues that a show devoted to self-promotion rather than reverence for the sport will eventually exhaust itself, with McAfee likely the first to run out of gas.

The extremely popular YouTuber Mr. Beast has revolutionized online video via one simple premise and goal: Always make the number go up. MrBeast has no real viewpoint, no angle, no agenda. (As the tech site Garbage Day noted, such personalities have “no concept of what it means to artistically or creatively express something.”) The only goal of MrBeast is to make you look at MrBeast.

“Most creators that go viral eventually settle into a baseline. They find an audience and start figuring out what their niche is beyond traffic. But MrBeast never did that. Because traffic is all he seems to want or care about,” Garbage Day continued. Thus, MrBeast’s strategy worked until it didn’t.

MrBeast’s traffic has plummeted in the last couple of years, and that’s surely going to continue. You cannot remain a formless traffic chaser forever. You have to be about something.

This is the “College GameDay” problem in a nutshell.

Whether McAfee’s tank runs dry or not, the show has already burned through the goodwill that once shielded it from criticism. For most of its run, GameDay enjoyed a kind of immunity no other ESPN studio show could claim, cherished in Tuscaloosa and Ann Arbor alike and largely spared the second-guessing routinely aimed at First Take. This season, its found itself on the receiving end of shots from newspaper columnists, cable news hosts, and even a handful of Utah students who needed nothing more than a phone and their university’s Instagram account to get under McAfee’s skin.

The obvious rebuttal is that GameDay remains a ratings juggernaut, and the numbers bear that out, with last Saturday’s show from Bloomington drawing 2.5 million viewers and the season pacing 4% ahead of last year’s average, but as our Matt Yoder wrote in September after Ted Cruz’s sit-down with Rece Davis, the higher those ratings climb, and the more GameDay leans on itself as the attraction, the more latitude the show has to stray from what made it great in the first place.

Yoder’s critique came from inside sports media, though, and until this week that’s largely where the complaints about McAfee stayed, circulating among trade reporters, media podcasts and outlets like this one. But a political morning show setting aside Election Day airtime to lament the state of a college football pregame program signals that the discontent now belongs to ordinary fans, people indifferent to contract talks and network infighting who just miss the GameDay they used to wake up to.

Open seasons usually end when the game thins out, or the hunters lose interest, and neither appears imminent while McAfee keeps answering every shot by striding back into the clearing with his shirt off.