Pat McAfee should own mistake, sincerely apologize to Michigan State, Larry Nassar victims

Pat McAfee must deliver a sincere apology to Michigan State and every one of Larry Nassar’s victims.

That’s it. That’s all the loud and loutish, foul-mouthed podcast/TV host and former NFL punter needs to do. He just needs to say he’s sorry, and mean it, after a failed attempt at humor while tweeting Sunday about Michigan State’s neon-green football uniforms.

Responding to a tweet about the uniforms from Evan Fox, a producer on his show and an MSU graduate, McAfee wrote: “I think Nassar was in on the design team actually”

It’s hard to understand the exact meaning of McAfee’s comment, but its intention is clear. He was trying to poke fun at Fox and his alma mater by invoking the pain and humiliation felt by the entire MSU community over one of the saddest episodes in the history of the school.

Nassar, the disgraced former sports doctor, was sentenced to 175 years in prison in 2018 for decades of sexual abuse under the guise of medical treatment committed during his employment at Michigan State and USA Gymnastics.

Hilarious, right?

McAfee clearly thought so, because he not only refused to apologize but he dug in his heels. He refused to delete his comment and even retweeted it to his 2.8 million followers. On his show Monday, McAfee offered a half-baked, disingenuous apology for his tweet, which he defended as innocent smack talk between friends while he cast himself as the victim.

“There is a (sic) all-out onslaught against me right now,” he said, “for simply linking one terrible thing from a school with the most terrible thing from the school to a friend in a reply tweet, talking (expletive) to a friend.

“And 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 they kind of did that whole thing. I was simply talking (expletive) to my friend.”

It got worse. McAfee veered from the ridiculous to the absurd when he portrayed critics of his comment as MSU alumni who enabled Nassar and want any mention of Nassar silenced.

“But does it feel like Michigan State alum (sic) are trying to silence some media whenever they acknowledge that Larry Nassar, one of the most horrible humans ever, of all time, he’s at Michigan State 14 years?” he said. “So that's not really part of the story. They kind of created and empowered (him).”

I’m not sure if McAfee studied polemics or was the captain of his debate team in college. But he very well might have been because he provided textbook examples of an ad hominem attack and a straw-man argument.

McAfee simply did what someone who has no standing to defend himself would do. He attacked the character of his critics, then he grotesquely twisted the motives of people who asked him to apologize for dredging up such a scarring episode for the MSU community and especially for the actual victims.

Let's make something clear. I’m not trying to cancel McAfee. He brought up the idea of being canceled and it’s obviously a major concern for him, since he just signed an $85 million deal with ESPN. He got that deal because he’s has a huge audience.

But that’s why it’s important for him to not be canceled, because he could do far more good by showing his audience that it’s OK to make a mistake, as long as you show true contrition and grow from the experience.

I’ve never met McAfee, but I’ve been around pro athletes like him for 30 years. Frankly, some of the stuff I’ve heard inside the bro culture of locker rooms would make McAfee’s comments seem tame. The difference is that those comments are made off the record, either between athletes or between athletes and reporters. They aren’t intentionally amplified to millions of people.

The irony of this slipped right past McAfee like a long snap in the dark when he defended the right to make his comment by saying: “We need to tell people that there's disgusting, horrible people in powerful positions. This isn’t something where it's like, hey, can't talk about this. No. It's like, hey, in our history, very recent history, people are given a lot of power and they’re very terrible people in the sports world.”

I hope I get to meet McAfee some day and speak with him about his comment, because I would like to ask him this question: You have a daughter, and if she were among the more than 160 girls and women Nassar was guilty of sexually assaulting, how would you feel about someone with a massive audience making fun of her tragic experience and then refusing to apologize for it?

I’d love to hear McAfee’s answer almost as much as I’d love to hear him sincerely apologize to everyone he has hurt.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pat McAfee must own mistake, apologize to Michigan State, Nassar victims