Jemele Hill Shares How She Relates to Pat McAfee Following Latest ESPN Drama | The Dan LeBatard Show

Shortly after The Pat McAfee Show was in a controversy due to comments made on-air by Aaron Rodgers about Jimmy Kimmel, Pat McAfee went to air to accuse an ESPN executive Norby Williamson with trying to “sabotage” The Pat McAfee show. Jemele Hill tweeted “I can relate” in response to the report and Jemele joined the show to discuss how she relates to McAfee’s accusation of ESPN trying to sabotage their own shows.

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Stugots I had a lot of former ESPN people current ESPN people people in general asking me about what happened with Pat McAfee and Norby Williamson for the uninitiated Pat McAfee called him a rat and accused him of sabotage which is fairly amazing just that the accusation of sabotage like I associate with like

Russian hacking and stuff you don’t often see a public claim of I was sabotaged but ESPN has hired a professional wrestler he’s good be a professional wrestler and I should say on the front end I root for Pat McAfee I root for ESPN slightly less than I root

For Pat McAfee but what I found interesting about this is how people maintain and protect power and the roots of the industry and the way ESPN manages to uh oversee its talent and keep its Talent under check and ESPN put out a statement in the wake of this new

Controversy that Pat McAfee embroiled himself in and it said positive things about Norby Williamson said they were going to handle the matter internally and right now I’m looking up at the Pat McAfee show Pat is doing his show from the side of the cfp finals so that would

Mean and I know it’s a big day for ESPN it would mean that Pat McAfee seemingly Got Away optically anyways got away with calling a Senior Management type uh a disparaging name not not not wait hold on a second not a Senior Management type Jamal and I can speak to this part the

Guy who runs ESPN The Shadow president the who keeps all of the this isn’t just a vice president this is the guy who’s run on the wrong side of steuart Scott and Dan Patrick and in general this is not a bug this is a feature this is how

You keep people controlled when you don’t want your talent misbehaving and the talent can be disposable and you want the letters to matter more than anything else so we bring in Jamal H H Hill here excuse me that was a terrible way to pronounce your long night Dan uh

It was a long night thank you stugots and thank you and uh I found most of this funny I found it interesting your takeaway as you watched it happen was what uh I think I was pretty amused by it as well because uh as you mentioned

Dan like this is just something that you just never see and especially at a place like ESPN where there is there’s sort of an unofficial cardinal rule about Talent on Talent crime or letting what is happening in the building spill out into public Arenas uh in the way in which Pat

McAfee did I mean I’ve never seen that in the history of this network that somebody just took a flamethrower to one of um one of the the executives there who has been there forever you know everybody knows who Norby is and um there was a part of me I know everybody

Saw my tweet when I said I can relate and you know there’s a lot of reasons for that is that I mean there what happened to Mike and I on the six o’cl Sports Center um one day I hope will be a case study for media classes everywhere and certainly toward the end

Of our time there we experienced a lot of what Pat McAfee was talking about and so that is the part that uh I could certainly relate to but yeah I mean it’s just the thing is where did they go from here because you have somebody and as

Much as they try to create a a separation between themselves and Pat McAfee by saying like this is his own outfit you know they’re sort of just renting the property and giving it a platform it’s like it’s on ES and people know that this is your show so trying to

Have these kind of um you know trying to make it seem like there’s some Nuance there where the average person understands that you know how this business Arrangement work is is kind of you know a bit of a fallacy so if you’re Talent there at ESPN and you’ve seen

This happen that is going to probably give you a little more sense of empowerment um thinking that okay so the next time that something happens that um you know a conflict sort of spills out and particularly dealing with this person in in general or really anybody there that’s an executive criticizing

The company public publicly is now open for business because if they don’t if they don’t do anything to Pat McAfee and I’m not even suggesting anything should be done to Pat McAfee but the reality is that this is setting a precedent in real time and certainly I know in times where

I’ve gotten into conflicts at ESPN I have used press on my side to say oh but you let such and such do it you let such and such get away with it so this is very much a wat moment in terms of how internal conflict is handled in a public manner

Jamala I think Pat can do it most can’t no nobody else can this is what no nobody nobody else can do this no you’re you’re completely right but that doesn’t matter because see here’s the thing that and you all know this when you’re in the building and you’re working for them

They try to sell you on the idea that everybody is treated the same and we know everybody is not treated the same and what this does is that this gives somebody this is going to give somebody down the road a lot of Leverage um in terms of how they have maybe dealt with

Some of the conflicts that have Arisen there and and no it’s true like everybody we know is not treated the same and how you’re treated depends on how much leverage you have and Pat McAfee has an awful lot of Leverage which is why he called his shot that’s

Why he did it to begin with because he already knew what the outcome would be any battle that I picked in ESPN I either knew I was going to win or I was okay with losing one of those two and he knew he would probably win this battle

Which is why he did it he picked pretty incredible timing because I know from my experience with Dan when you get it uh caught up in multiple instances like this in a very short period of time that’s when the writing started being on the wall for us but Pat did this at a

Time coming off of probably the the biggest heat that he’d had internally at ESPN with the Rogers Jimmy Kimmel thing granted he’s positioned as an innocent bystander whether you believe that or not so he does this thing about Norby and he has his direct relationships with Jimmy pataro he’s got great

Relationships there with Kirk herbstreet Iger photog and he does and and also Burke Magnus too like also him as well so he does this right before the cfp final in a day that’s huge and he’s a integral part of their college football coverage but to me it’s Sensational headlines ESPN Talent calls senior

Executive a rat I get all that but there is an issue with ESPN and leaking there has been for several years and we know how many middle management types and upper management types has have filtered through there we know how how many talents have cycled through ESPN and yet

The leaks persist they keep going to the same two reporters and they’re of the same nature and I know from participating in their compliance training and in town halls and having Senior Management tell me directly how important it is to Disney to not be leaking things out and yet in this

Statement there is nothing about this leak they would seem to have a Serial leaker leaking constantly privileged information and yet they’re doing nothing about it Norby Williamson was the first name in that press release from ESPN it was protecting him uh I believe that these people did this to us at the

End with a series of strategic orchest rated leaks and it’s obviously to control the narrative but Jamal when I talk about this being a feature not a bug because you talk about predent like I said Dan Patrick wanted a television in his office before the biggest show

They’ve ever had just to have it and if and they told him no because if he got a television in his office then everyone would want a television in their office and what I heard all the time is we cannot establish precedents but the way that you tell me if I’m wrong about

Anything that I’m saying here Jamal when I saw you in Bristol the first time you were at a cubicle I was surprised by how small everything was I was surprised by producers running the company and the way that that kept the way that that power gets kept is by making all of the

Talent disposable not allowing for anything in the way of Precedence but the match that they now have this is not some scared insecure journalist in the van business who’s interested in respecting Authority this is a guy who’s got all his own powers and is renting to

Them like he will be bigger the moment that he leaves there because he was too hot for Disney to handle than he was at any point before that he has nothing to fear here and that has to scare the hell out of them when the New Media becomes

About the Shannon Sharps and the mcafe and the athletes who aren’t going to tolerate a middle manager or a vice president telling them how to do business when they’re not employees and they don’t need the money yeah well well that’s why what he did was very remarkable and he used that

Leverage that he has is that he didn’t need them necessarily from the outset and when you have that kind of element at ESPN which is very different from how most people there um most of the situations that they’re in most people there need ESPN or uh the platform has

Helped them grow their brand in a way that it wasn’t there before but when you have have a few outsize outsized personalities who don’t need the network they’re going to behave accordingly and that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing but it is

To say that when that power Dynamic shifts that’s when things get more hard more difficult you know it’s funny skip bis of all people told me this a long time ago um and this is when I was in my very early years at ESPN I got the ESPN

In 2006 and he said one of the issues at the network is that he said they treat you differently depending on whether or not they feel like they made you and his entire you know we were just having sort of a you know just a casual conversation

And what he was basically saying is that like the people there that they feel like they are directly responsible for how their careers Blossom they tend to treat a certain way versus the people who they know they’re not so attached to being there or they feel or the people

Who know that they didn’t make them that is you get treated a little bit differently because you’re going to carry yourself a little bit differently there’s a lot of people there who can’t imagine their lives and careers without ESPN I was always somebody who could ESPN was never going to be my final

Wrestling place in this business and so while the brand meant something to me and being there meant something to me and I took pride in in my work while I was there ESPN was not the end all be all to me and I think what happens is

They have so much leverage over so much talent that is there that there is this sort of Fallen line that gets done there and so a lot of times and and I’m sure this is why you heard from people outside of ESPN who no longer work there

And people even inside the building so when you see a pat macafee that comes on that is a huge glitch in The Matrix you sort of perversely cheer for this this type of conflict uh because I certainly I laughed I mean my that was my very

First reaction I laughed so hard when I saw that light oh yeah this is about to get very very interesting