‘Walking around on eggshells’: Barstool employee describes working with ‘always paranoid’ Pat McAfee

Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images. Barstool Sports

ESPN’s Pat McAfee has been heavily featured in headlines this week after taking offense to a light-hearted video posted by the University of Utah and invoking the assassination of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk. Now one of his former co-workers at Barstool Sports is detailing his time working alongside McAfee, saying that the former NFL kicker is “always paranoid.”

Jeff “Vibbs” Vibbert is a long-time Barstool Sports staffer from Indiana and worked with McAfee back in 2017 when McAfee joined the company and helped launch Barstool Heartland in Indianapolis, which became the launchpad for what has been a meteoric rise in the media.

McAfee wasn’t at Barstool for long, leaving in 2018 after feeling “disrespected by the business people in the building.” Vibbert recently appeared on Barstool’s Out and About with hosts Pat McAuliffe and Kelly Keegs and discussed his time working with McAfee.

“I think that paranoia is who he is. He’s always paranoid. When we were working there, you’re just kind of walking around on eggshells, wondering what he’s going to be like emotionally when he shows up, who he’s going to be mad at, who he’s going to be feuding with. He just has a paranoia, and you have to go along with it. You have to co-sign the paranoia and be like, ‘yup, yup, you’re very valid in what you’re thinking,” Vibbert said.

Vibbert also touched on the many feuds McAfee seems to have with those he feels have slighted him.

“We’ve seen that script a million times where he’s like, ‘You know what, I don’t like them, they slighted me. In fact, I hate them. I’m never going to associate with them, I’m cutting them off, I’m burning that bridge completely.’ And then wash, rinse, repeat; we’d do it again with something else when someone else slights him. Every other week he’d be doing that,” Vibbs said.

“That Charlie Kirk video, I watched it, and it just gave me flashbacks of like, here we go, going off, and then you’ve got to sit around the next day and be like, ‘Yup, that was justified.”

If what Vibbert is saying is true, it may not take long for more of McAfee’s paranoia to leak into the public eye. For McAfee’s part, he has shared a lengthy, emotional post about the past week and explained where he was coming from. Only time will tell if this becomes a common occurrence, and whether ESPN will be willing to continually deal with the noise if so.

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Source: sports.yahoo.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.