ESPN's Pat McAfee apologizes, then defends his post about Larry Nassar, Michigan State
On Monday, Pat McAfee, a former NFL kicker/punter and one of the newest featured commentators for ESPN, took time on his show to address his recent controversial post that referenced Larry Nassar, a former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics sports doctor in prison for sexually abusing young female gymnasts.
McAfee's original post on X, formerly Twitter, was in reply to a photo of Michigan State's neon football jerseys, in which McAfee said, "Nassar was in on the design team actually."
The interaction immediately drew backlash.
While McAfee issued an apology in a video posted Monday, it was said in a somewhat sarcastic tone as he continued to defend his post and placed the blame on how others perceived it.
"There is an all-out onslaught against me right now for simply linking a terrible thing from a school to the most terrible thing from the school to a friend in a reply tweet, talking (expletive) to a friend," McAfee said. "I do apologize if some people took that in a different way and then spun it in their own narrative to offend a bunch of other people and kind of did that whole thing."
McAfee then seemed to double-down on his post, insinuating that the Michigan State fan base was trying to bury the story.
"Does it feel like some Michigan State alums are trying to silence the media, whenever they acknowledge Larry Nassar, one of the most horrible humans, ever, of all time, he was at Michigan State for 14 years," McAfee said. "So that's not really a part of the story. They kind of created and empowered, and yeah, so like, if that's going to get us canceled..."
He then continued by saying he didn't know why he should delete it and apologize.
"People were like 'you need to delete this and apologize,' and I'm like 'uh, why, I'm talking (expletive) to my friend about something that definitely happened at his school, and I said this guy's on a design team," McAfee said. "Which if he was, this guy has done the worst imaginable, so if he did design those terrible jerseys Michigan State had as well, that wouldn't even be mentioned in the Larry Nassar entire thing."
Later in the video, he went into how horrible of a person he believes Nassar is. Nassar was sentenced to 175 years in prison in 2018 for sexual abuse under the guise of medical treatment.
"I wanna let everyone know who's coming after me, we believe Larry Nassar, terrible human, worst human, disgusting human" McAfee said. "I would like to say this show covered that more than probably, more than anybody about how bad of a guy he is."
He appeared to defend his post by saying this is how he chooses to cover situations that place people like Nassar in positions of power.
"We need to tell people that there's disgusting, horrible people in powerful positions," McAfee said. "This isn't something where it's like 'I can't talk about this.' No, like, hey, in our history, very recent history, people were given a lot of power that were very terrible people in the sports world and the way we decide to cover it is by talking (expletive) to somebody who loves everything about Michigan State because it's his school."
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pat McAfee apologizes, then defends Larry Nassar-Michigan State post
