Bill Simmons has swung back at Pat McAfee as the feud between sports media heavyweights continues.
The beef started when Simmons did an impression of “The Pat McAfee Show” on his podcast, making the show sound meathead-y and disorganized.
Explore More
McAfee responded by accusing Simmons of having paltry gambling affiliate numbers and insinuating that the Ringer founder’s best content days were behind him.
“Keep running your mouth,” McAfee snarled.
On his own podcast, Simmons fired a ricochet shot at McAfee in the middle of an aside about rising sports TV ratings.
“Have you noticed how with sports ratings, everybody’s sports ratings are up on TV?” he asked rhetorically.
“We just had the Super Bowl, it came out it was the most-watched Super Bowl ever — 123 million. It’s like, that seems weird, because I thought people under 25 were on TikTok and YouTube and Snapchat and on all the streaming services. You have so many more TV choices … Why would the ratings go up?
“And then you see, ESPN, at the end of the month, they’ll be like ‘Highest ratings ever’ for ‘Get Up’ and all these different shows. Same thing for Fox. All their shows are up. Everybody’s ratings are up except for the NBA and whoever replaced 12 p.m. ‘SportsCenter.’
“If your ratings don’t go up, it’s probably a bad sign.”
As you probably surmised, it was McAfee that replaced the noon edition of ‘SportsCenter’.
Last month, former Post columnist Andrew Marchand reported that McAfee’s audience declined an average of 48 percent from its “First Take” lead-in, from September through December of 2023, and that it was down 12 percent versus the comparable window the prior year.
McAfee was incensed and accused ESPN executive Norby Williamson of leaking these numbers, which are otherwise relatively easy to obtain.
McAfee alleged that Williamson was attempting to “sabotage” the show on ESPN.
ESPN pointed out in a press release that McAfee does gobsmacking numbers on YouTube, where the show is simulcast, and on social media, where highlights are spliced up and gobbled up like candy, totaling millions of impressions.
Digital metrics are still in their primacy and are challenging to make apples-to-apples comparisons for, relative to linear TV numbers which are compiled by a neutral third party in Nielsen.
In any event, we now await McAfee’s inevitable counter-attack.
ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlf3V7j2tmamxfqL2wvtOsZpuhnKF6tLXMpqanq12awKSty5qrnqtdl7KmsoywoK2gXaWutXnMnJifnZViv6q80manqKeiYsG3edGaq6Kml6h8