Pat McAfee Uses His Show To Say ESPN Boss Is 'Actively Trying To Sabotage" Him, Raising Questions About His Future At The Network

​​Less than four months after his ESPN debut, Pat McAfee called out his boss on ESPN. By name.

Friday, McAfee accused someone of "actively trying to sabotage" him "from within ESPN." He later specified that Norby Williamson, ESPN Executive Editor and Head of Event and Studio Production, is that person.

You can watch the segment below:

"Williamson is seemingly the only human that has information, and then somehow that information gets leaked and it's wrong and then it sets a narrative of what our show is. And then are we just going to combat that from a rat every single time?" says McAfee.

"Somebody tried to get ahead of our actual ratings release with wrong numbers 12 hours beforehand. That's a sabotage attempt, and it's been happening ... from some people who didn't necessarily love the old addition of the Pat McAfee Show to the ESPN family."

McAfee is referencing an article from the New York Post on Thursday headlined "Pat McAfee needs to produce better ratings to be worth $85 million — and headaches — for ESPN."

The piece references how McAfee's show caused a snafu within Disney after his weekly guest Aaron Rodgers made a joke about ABC host Jimmy Kimmel not wanting the names on the Jeffrey Epstein client list to be revealed.

We explained the meaning behind Rodgers' joke. And how it wasn't a suggestion that Kimmel is a pedophile.

However, Kimmel threatened legal action and The Post article argued that McAfee's television ratings do not justify the headache that is alienating Kimmel, the biggest talk show Disney (the parent company of ESPN) employs.

"Since the inception of McAfee’s show on ESPN in the fall, Stephen A. Smith and “First Take” are handing McAfee a 583,000 viewer lead-in, and McAfee is maintaining just 302,000, which is a 48 percent drop," reads the report.

Consider that the poor ratings are, in part, due to an unnatural transition between Stephen A's primarily black audience of NBA viewers and McAfee’s primarily white audience of football viewers. The idea to pair the shows back to back was poor from the start.

Nonetheless, McAfee believes Norby Williamson planted the narrative published in The Post. He thinks Williamson leaked the data the outlet cited on Thursday to get ahead of the positive press release on Friday, touting the show's overall performance.

Perhaps Williamson did.

For background, Williamson has worked for ESPN for nearly four decades. He oversees all of the talk programs. Williamson is third in command, after ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro and President (Content) Burke Magnus.

According to sources, Pitaro and Magnus hired McAfee over Williamson's head. As McAfee noted, Williamson didn't want to hire him.

Sources within ESPN also say Williamson, an old-school television mind, doesn't value McAfee's worth to YouTube, where he averages 403,000 viewers a day.

Williamson is a SportsCenter guy. Literally. He runs SportsCenter. So naturally, he disagreed with the decision to replace SportsCenter on television with a podcast that rates poorly on television.

In the same vein, people inside ESPN believe Williamson was the leak to a FrontOfficeSports report in April saying ESPN had an interest in Cowherd. Cowherd's show competes with McAfee's head-to-head every day from noon to 3 pm ET.

The report read like a warning to McAfee: people at ESPN already want to replace you with Colin Cowherd.

And those people will have the opportunity to replace McAfee.

ESPN did not respond to requests for comment from OutKick. But McAfee's future is now certainly in question.

There is no precedent in media for an on-air host calling his or her boss a rat by name. (Other than Howard Stern.)

Can ESPN continue to put McAfee on air after he disparaged his own boss and network? The company has to make that decision soon.

On Friday, just before McAfee's show aired, ESPN announced that he would lead a special presentation of the College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday.

"ESPN’s 10th National Championship MegaCast will be led by Field Pass with The Pat McAfee Show, " said the network.

Awkward.