Pat McAfee swears he isn’t a political guy, but the people who hate him keep dragging Charlie Kirk’s murder into his mentions.
His bosses at ESPN just admitted the danger is real.
And McAfee got one warning from federal agents that most sports hosts never hear.
The FBI Told a Football Analyst to Dress Like a Cop
The FBI advised Pat McAfee to wear a bulletproof vest in the week after an assassin gunned down Charlie Kirk, according to a source who spoke with Front Office Sports.
Let that sink in for a second. A former Colts punter who hollers about college football for a living got the same advice federal agents give to politicians and undercover officers.
The same report says McAfee receives threatening messages and death threats on a regular basis. The FBI didn’t answer when the New York Post asked for comment.
Kirk died on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University in Orem. He was 31 years old. He spent his final moments doing the thing he loved most, which was arguing with college students who disagreed with him.
McAfee spoke up fast. “I’m not a political person, but I am a proud American citizen and today was startling, saddening, and maddening all at the same time,” he wrote on X.
He also called Kirk “a name synonymous with having the courage to speak what you believe and seek/welcome conversations with those whom you disagree with.”
That was apparently enough. One sports host mourned a murdered man in public, and some of the sickest corners of the internet decided he belonged on their list too.
One University Thought the Hate Made Good Content
Fast forward to the College GameDay stop at the University of Utah this fall. Viewers noticed right away that McAfee looked like a man who wanted to be anywhere else.
The school had teamed up on a video ahead of the broadcast in which students did impressions of McAfee. He felt they were “talking trash.” The University of Utah posted it on Instagram anyway.
Then a student in the kicking contest complained that she could “only” win $1 million.
McAfee let it all out on his own show afterward. He said he “never felt more uncomfortable” than he did on that set, and he didn’t need a diagram to explain why.
“I thought to myself: Has anything really scary happened at, like, a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?” McAfee said.
“Do you think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university? I don’t know,” he continued. “So it was just a lot of mixed feelings for me going out there.”
He wrapped the rant with a line only McAfee could deliver. “It’s like, alright, I hate this place. They have a good football team, though.”
The University of Utah isn’t Utah Valley University. But the two campuses sit a short drive apart, and nobody in a school communications office should need a map to figure that out.
ESPN backed its star. “We support Pat and recognize the very real and valid concerns he has around safety and security,” the network said in a statement.
The university folded soon after. Officials admitted the video “missed the mark” and said they reached out to McAfee to express regret. “We sincerely apologize for creating any perception that Pat was unsafe or unwelcome on our campus,” the school said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
But somebody on staff approved that video. The school’s own statement concedes that university employees review and post everything on those official accounts. Somebody watched students mock a man with a file full of death threats and clicked the button.
When a Murder Turns Into Slang, the Threats Follow
The vest warning explains a moment from September 2026 that left McAfee’s studio cold.
He was reading replies to one of his X posts on air when he stopped on one. “Somebody just said they wanted me to get Kirked live on-air,” McAfee told viewers. “What does that mean?”
The anonymous account had written that if someone “kirked him live during his show it would be a top 3 moment in the history of mankind.” The poster deleted it after it spread. Co-host AJ Hawk and the rest of the room went silent.
McAfee tried to laugh his way to the commercial. “That’s crazy. I hope that doesn’t happen, by the way,” he said.
Kirked. Somebody took the name of a husband and father of two and turned it into a verb for murder.
And that wasn’t one lowlife freelancing. In the months after the assassination, the internet churned out “Kirkified” face-swap memes and a slang mashup called “lowkirkenuinely.” One crypto hustler even pushed a meme coin he called “Kirkinator.” Mocking a slain man became a content genre.
The same crowd already had a word on the shelf. Before Kirk ever set foot on that campus, voices on the Left were calling for executives and conservative politicians to get “luigi’d,” slang lifted from Luigi Mangione, the man prosecutors charged in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione hasn’t been convicted. His name became a punchline anyway.
See the pattern? A killing becomes a joke. The joke becomes a word. And the word lands in a sportscaster’s inbox as a death wish.
Maybe that reads too much into it. Plenty of the folks who torment McAfee online don’t vote at all. Some just can’t stand his shtick, his giant ESPN contract, or his habit of taking his shirt off on live television.
But the FBI doesn’t recommend body armor because a few teenagers got rude in the replies. Agents saw enough in the week after Kirk died to tell a man who talks football to armor up.
McAfee Never Signed Up for This Fight
Here’s the part that ought to make every American’s blood boil. McAfee doesn’t speak at Turning Point USA rallies. He doesn’t host a political podcast. He told the whole country he wasn’t political.
His only crime, as far as his tormentors were concerned, was grieving out loud for a murdered conservative.
That says plenty about the climate left-wing political violence has built since 2024. Two attempts on President Trump’s life. The armed man police arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022. Then Kirk, cut down in front of students. And now anyone who mourns him becomes fair game.
The media mostly treated the Kirkified memes as edgy internet humor. Picture the reaction if conservative accounts turned a slain left-wing activist’s name into a verb and wished it on a network host. Cable panels would run wall to wall coverage before lunch, and the Big Tech censors would find their delete buttons in record time.
ESPN deserves some credit here. The network stood behind McAfee instead of lecturing him about tone.
The University of Utah deserves a lot less. Its apology only arrived after McAfee aired his complaint to an audience of millions. Reports say he has vowed not to go back.
GameDay rolls onto a new campus every week this season, and McAfee rolls with it into crowds of tens of thousands of strangers. Every school that hosts him now knows exactly what the FBI told him. The real question is whether any of them will take it as seriously as the agents did.
Pat McAfee told America in September 2025 that he wasn’t a political person. Within days, the FBI told him to dress for work like one.
Sources: New York Post, “FBI reportedly advised Pat McAfee to wear bulletproof vest in wake of Charlie Kirk assassination”; Front Office Sports; Sportsnaut, “Pat McAfee Leaves Co-hosts Speechless by Reading Disturbing Threat Live on Air”; Fox News; FandomWire; Know Your Meme; Daily Dot; Rolling Stone; The Spectator Australia