THE FOOTBALL BRO

Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.

- Vinson Cunningham

If, on a cool weekend morning in autumn, you happen to be watching “College GameDay,” on ESPN, don’t worry about figuring out which of the broadcasters behind the improbably long desk is Pat McAfee. He’s the one with the roast-pork tan, his hair cut high and tight, likely tieless among his more businesslike colleagues. The rest of the onair crew—Lee Corso, Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and, newly, the former University of Alabama coach Nick Saban—tend to look and dress and talk like participants in an old-school Republican-primary debate. McAfee, though, favors windowpane checks on his jackets and a slip of chest poking out from behind his two or three open buttons. If the others are politicians, he’s the cool-coded megachurch pastor who sometimes acts as their spiritual adviser.

This Saturday-morning getup—little brother gets sharp—counts as downright dressy for McAfee, who, in the course of the past few years, has become one of ESPN’s most visible sports-talking stars. In 2019, two years after retiring from the N.F.L., where he had been a punter for the Indianapolis Colts for eight years, he started his own program, “The Pat McAfee Show.” On the current version of the show—which he began licensing to ESPN last fall, and now runs for two hours every weekday afternoon—he typically wears only a tank top and a thin gold chain. It’s all about context: wherever McAfee appears, he’s always trying—he’s never effortless, that’s not his thing—to be underdressed by a few noticeable degrees. That style rule is symbolic of his broader meaning on sports TV. He’s there to loosen things up.