The Pat McAfee show consistently delivers one of the most entertaining daily sports shows all year round, particularly during the NFL season. Apart from being a big reason I’ve recently fallen back in love with sports and sports tech, I’ve always appreciated the show’s rate of innovation and creativity, especially in an industry where some content producers that don’t change much year over year. The show feels like a hilarious breath of fresh air, and holding onto that feeling for an extended period of time is no small task. In that vein, here are a few ideas that might help keep the show dynamic and fresh, and I’ve thrown in a prospective sponsor for each segment.
Reporter in the Field (by John Deere)
The Pat McAfee show is generally pretty studio-centric unless they are on the road. There might be an opportunity to get a person on the ground at big events like the Masters, March Madness, etc., and the unique angle into interviews and access might be a focus on the playing surfaces (fields) and support teams. Interviews with groundskeepers, trainers, scouts, etc. might be a good beach head to establish interviewer credibility and to eventually expand the interviewee pool to all athletes and team members. Of course, a segment about fields would have to be sponsored by John Deere.
One of my favorite events from the show in recent memory was Pat frantically texting in a question to Matt Ryan’s first press conference as a Colt. This reminded me a lot of Nathan For You’s episode where Nathan does an interview with an elementary-schooler telling him how to answer all the questions. There might also be an opportunity to combine these two pieces of comedy gold and have the reporter in the field go to various press conferences or do remote interviews and the guys in the studio get to dictate what they ask and say. I feel like the results would be 90% comedy, 10% incredible insight.
(If you haven’t seen the Nathan for You clip, I highly recommend it but prepare for cringe)
Average Human (by Bud Light)
Every Olympics cycle, I think about how the average person would perform against the best athletes in the world. Beyond the Olympics, events like the NFL combine, the NHL playoffs, the MLB All-Star game, and really any sporting event where athletes compete offer the opportunity to put out a funny comparison of the pros and the average human, particularly during the NFL offseason. Having one of the guys on the show, or a new average person, periodically take on athletic events like the 3-cone drill, a home run derby, or a curling match would be a fun way to prop up the skills of professional athletes and create some potentially viral content.
For this to work well, the average person would need to have absolute confidence in their ability, and having them challenge pro athletes familiar with the show at their respective sport would be potentially hilarious, especially if it means we would finally see Boston Connor go toe-to-toe with AJ Dillon again. If this average person character is entertaining enough, they could definitely challenge GMs and other managers at their roles as well, which might lead to some great clips.
Geek Week (by Seat Geek, of course)
The Geek Week is definitely something that I would personally enjoy, so it makes the list. I think some of the most interesting interviews that Pat and AJ do are with GMs, coaches, doctors, and athletes that think about the game form different perspectives, all of whom are fairly geeky groups. Either they love the history of the sport, they bring a unique technical or financial perspective, or most stereotypically, they are huge data nerds. In any case, the geekier the interviewee, the more insightful and entertaining the content seems to be. The Geek Week sponsored by Seat Geek could be a yearly or bi-yearly week-long event that highlights the geeks in the sports industry to pull the curtain back on what goes on behind the scenes of sports.
The week could also have sponsored segments like the “WebMD Medical Hour” with the Colts team doctor or the “Rules of the Road” with Gene Steratore. The possibilities are pretty endless, and the theme might provide some structure to the NFL offseason days when there is not much news flying. If the team is super lucky, they might even be able to get the John Brenkus to come into town and give the guys a multi-sport competition in a makeshift Sports Science Lab. Or, with even more luck, Daniel Tosh can come out to reprise his role as an analyst.
P.S. This has been included as a “Product” article since there are few products as widely consumed as on-screen media (and we’ve recently seen what happens when that product stops hitting the mark).
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