College football fans tire of ESPN, Finebaum, Pat McAfee, YouTube dispute

To be a proper college football pregame show, a program has to find the right balance between antics and information.

ESPN's College Football GameDay has teetered far toward the antics with the emergence of Pat McAfee as the leading personality and the voice of the show.

Saturday morning he did another full segment shirtless, pacing around the set and expounding on how to handle "the haters and detractors" in one's life.

He dropped into a football stance, catering to the Utah crowd by mimicking the Ute's all-conference left tackles, Spencer Fano and Caleb Lomu, drop-stepping into a pass blocking set in jeans and a big belt buckle.

On the weekend that ESPN/Disney was denying programming to 10 million YouTube TV subscribers in a carriage dispute, it was a bad look. The unending focus on McAfee's bellowing and self-glorification takes away from the fact that the game of college football and the campus atmosphere are the real stars of the show.

A host's job is to be entertaining and informative within the framework of the program, not to co-opt it completely, not to turn it into a circus. It makes a longtime college football fan long for the days of Lee Corso and Beano Cook, even Lou Holtz.

McAfee is a former placekicker at West Virginia and for the Indianapolis Colts who made two Pro Bowls, an occasional WWE wrestler and a ringside commentator. He presumes to borrow the schtick of the wrestling culture and apply it to GameDay, but it's not entirely translatable.

After all, everyone knows that wrestling is faked and the storylines and personalities are contrived, In that context, people want and expect an outsized show and exaggerated posturing.

On the other end of the spectrum the World-Wide Network relies on relentless seriousness and pontification. Paul Finebaum preaches from the gospel of the SEC with a fervor, rhapsodizing about the SEC gauntlet and its supposed supremacy.

Never mind that the Big Ten has won the last two national championships. Never mind that inflated FPI and poll ratings create the perception of a gantlet. ESPN keeps promoting and producing this narrative, while charging subscribers and streaming services more and more to consume it.

At least seven-time national champion Nick Saban has a sense of humor about his place in the college football landscape. The endless self-promoters could learn.