Hope Pat McAfee gets exactly what he deserves

Close your eyes and imagine an Ole Miss freshman co-ed sorority girl, and you'd probably come up with a pretty, smiling, wholesome-looking young blonde. Someone who looks a lot like Mary Kate Cornett. 

You may not have heard of Mary Kate Cornett. Up until February, she was pretty much just a rando college kid. But late in February, one of her fellow students anonymously posted a salacious rumor about her on Yik Yak.

Yik Yak? I thought they had gone out of business for being yet another loathsome social media site known for its cyberbullying. Well, Yik Yak had closed its virtual doors in 2017, but it somehow re-emerged in 2022, with promises to be more vigilant about moderating its content.

Apparently that didn't happen.

What Mary Kate woke up to one fine Oxford, Mississippi morning, was a completely unfounded rumor, already going viral, that she was having an affair with her boyfriend's father.

This would have been horrifying enough if the rumor mill had been restricted to the Ole Miss knuckleheads and knuckledraggers who revel in Yik Yak. But the rumor, of course, took flight, amplified on X and often accompanied by pictures of her lifted from her Insta account.

Which would have been bad enough if some big mouth/big names in the sports talk bro-isphere hadn't jumped in on the fun.

The biggest of the big name big mouths to jump in was one Pat McAfee, a former NFL player who is an analyst on ESPN, pretty much the premier sports network. 

McAfee was broadcasting from the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine, where college players run around and jump around so pro scouts and coaches can determine whether they're worthy of getting chosen high up (or at all) in the NFL draft, which is held in late April. The subject of the day was supposedly the Combine, and sitting in as a McAfee guest was Adam Schefter, another ESPN-er who's an "NFL insider." He was supposedly going to be revealing the skinny on which teams were going to be interested in which jocks. But good old Pat had other things on his mind:

He teases the subject, asking Schefter: “Have you heard about Ole Miss?” One of his cohorts says, “There is a ménage à trois …” that, McAfee adds, “has really captivated the internet.” After some more buildup, McAfee dives in.

“Some Ole Miss frat bro, k? Had a K-D (Kappa Delta) girlfriend,” McAfee says, and then he stresses the word “allegedly.”

“At this exact moment, this is what is being reported by … everybody on the internet: Dad had sex with son’s girlfriend.” Another person on set chimes in – “Not great” – and then McAfee adds: “And then it was made public … that’s the absolute worst-case situation.” (Source: NY Times)

Schefter, who looked a bit taken aback, tried to reroute things, getting it back to football, by bringing up the name of Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart, who will be in play in the upcoming draft. But McAfee was not to be diverted. Instead of continuing down the 'let's talk about Jaxson Dart's arm' road, wanted to stay on his own personal topic of the day.

McAfee never names the 18-year-old college freshman at the center of the rumor, but he jokes about shoehorning Ole Miss fathers into NFL Draft analysis — “We’re just wondering. His dad … We’re just trying to combine evaluate …” Then another person on set interjects: “Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now.”

The segment lasts roughly two minutes. McAfee worked an unsubstantiated internet rumor into his show, then transitioned to analyzing Dart’s draft stock and moved on.

McAfee was not alone among sports "names" who were getting their sports talk rocks off on this story. The memes were flying. Antonio Brown (a former bad-news NFL player who had a brief, inglorious stint with the Patriots) posted on X. A couple of guys from Barstool sports, infamous for its bad taste and sexism, got in on the act, one clown using X to promote a memecoin with Cornett's name on it. And ESPN radio aholes in St. Louis devoted time to the story, one:

...doing a dramatic reading of a purported Snapchat message that accompanied one of the original posts. The station then promoted the clip on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram as part of an “Infidelity Alley” segment.

The story no longer contained in the Ole Miss and adjacent small time universes, and seemingly legitimized by ESPN and Barstool-ers, things started to get even more terrible for Cornett.

After receiving all sorts of rancid notes slipped under her dorm room door, campus police told her she had become a target. She had to move out of her dorm and begin taking classes online. Cornett was doxxed, and her voicemail was bombarded with ugly messages. Ditto her phone, with texts using words like "whore" and "slut" and suggesting she kill herself. Her life was become a living hell. 

When she goes out - which isn't often - she says:

“I (can’t) even walk on campus without people taking pictures of me or screaming my name or saying super vulgar, disgusting things to me,” she said.

These are her fellow students? She really needs to consider transferring someplace else.

“The only way I could describe it is it’s like you’re walking with your daughter on the street, holding her hand, and a car mirror snags her shirt and starts dragging her down the road. And all you can do is watch,” Cornett’s father, Justin, said. “You can’t catch the car. You can’t stop it from happening. You just have to sit there and watch your kid be destroyed.”

And it's not just Mary Kate Cornett heself who's been a target. Her mother's house was swatted after Houston PD got a call about a possible homicide there. And her grandfather has received harrassing calls in the middle of the night.

Mary Kate Cornett plans on going after McAfee and ESPN. I hope she wins big against these outrageous bully boy aholes. Oxford, Mississippi, police are investigating, and hopefully they'll figure out the student jerk who started the Yik Yak rumor and make his/her weenie life at least a bit of the living hell (s)he's made of Mary Kate Cornett. (For her sake, I hope its not anyone she knows...)

McAfee et al. will likely hide behind the preposterous shields of we didn't use her name, it's all in fun, we're just a bunch of loud-mouth goof balls. Just a bunch of shock-jocks trying to provide content that's "comedic informative."

Of course, it goes nearly without saying - but I'll say it anyway - McAfee is a "friend" and mega-MAGA supporter of Donald Trump. Hope that Mary Kate Corbett takes him for every penny he's worth.

But the worst part of the story may be this: 

Before he broadcast the rumor about Cornett to his masses, McAfee opened his Feb. 26 show talking about his young daughter, how he took her to Disney World (Disney is ESPN’s parent company) and how witnessing his daughter’s “pure joy” brought tears to his eyes.

“Am I a big, sappy softy now that I have a daughter?” he asked his stooges [the guys who sit with him and yuck it up on his show]. “I think so.”

And he couldn't take a moment to think about how he'd feel if, when his little girl's a bit more grown up, someone came after her like that? Couldn't put himself in Justin Cornett's place for an NFL minute. No empathy, no imagination, nothing beyond complete and utter self-centeredness. (Friend of Trump, you say...)

Fast forward and the "big, sappy softy" may want to think about what he'll have to say to his daughter when she figures out what a nasty fool her old man is.