When Pat McAfee stepped down from his role as color commentator on WWE SmackDown last fall, both he and the company made it sound like a temporary thing. He had just accepted a spot on ESPN’s College GameDay, one that made scheduling with SmackDown impossible — Friday nights and Saturday mornings in two different places doesn’t work.
There was every reason to expect McAfee would be back once the football season ended. Then it came and went, and except for an appearance to help call the Royal Rumble that was such a tightly guarded secret even Michael Cole was caught off guard, he has not, in fact, returned.
To get some insight into why that might be, it’s best to go straight to the source, meaning a long Twitter post McAfee made this week. While it concerns his considerations of his overall business and brand, there’s one paragraph that specifically has to do with his WWE future.
Baby girl on the way… what’s that mean for my future with @WWE? I LOVE it but, they’re allegedly gonna be sold, who’s buying them? Do I want to work/make money for those people?
Being father to a new baby girl would enter anyone’s personal calculus. But it’s interesting that McAfee references a potential WWE sale and not knowing who the buyer might be. The insinuation is that it could be someone with whom he might not be comfortable working, and he’d like to see how that all shakes out.
This more than likely isn’t what WWE expected when it trumpeted signing McAfee to a multi-year extension last July. While the company is in a good place with Corey Graves and Wade Barrett as color commentators, there’s no question that McAfee’s unbridled enthusiasm is hard to duplicate. If you want someone to make any given match seem like the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, McAfee was your guy.
The Royal Rumble appearance made it pretty clear the door is always open for McAfee to make his way back to WWE. Now it’s just a matter of whether his family life, his busy schedule, and apparently, the company’s ownership situation, allow it.