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| Monday, August 24, 2026 |
Issue #13
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by meme.app
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It's Monday. We are one weekend away from college football. Pat McAfee released a country-rap album. And Penn State ran the only pledge program in America with a supply chain. Let's get into it.
One note before we start: there is no Morning Stew social media team. There's forwarding. If you like the issue, send it to your group chat. That's the entire marketing department.
— Stew
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The Pat McAfee Takeover Is Complete
Here is Pat McAfee's last ten days. He released a country-rap album. The internet accused the album of being AI. A fake rumor claimed he was inheriting Lee Corso's headgear picks on College GameDay, and he had to publicly shoot it down, noting the headgear was retired last year and stays retired. Then ESPN, which already gives him three hours a day plus GameDay every Saturday, added him to Monday Night Countdown. That last one is a week old, so you've heard, but it completes the set: by ESPN's own description, McAfee is now on the air six or seven days a week. Fans have started calling the network Pat McESPN.
About that album. It's called The Diary of a Polarizing Figure, fourteen tracks, cut in Nashville with Morgan Wallen's producer after a Jelly Roll introduction. Then the producer revealed how it started: McAfee had been feeding twenty years of phone-notes lyrics into Suno, an AI music generator, and bringing in the demos. Half the internet declared the whole thing AI slop, a review gave it a D+ and said he sounds like “a robot doing a human impression,” and McAfee had to insist, on the record, “I wrote and sang every word.” The man is currently defending his authenticity as a rapper and his innocence as a mascot in the same news cycle.
Cool stat: McAfee's June extension pays him roughly $60 million a year, about double his old deal, and his reps reportedly opened the negotiation at $100 million. ESPN's own framing of his new footprint: on air “six or seven days weekly.” There are only seven.
So what: In July, ESPN laid off Ryan Clark, Karl Ravech, and Tom Pelissero, among others. In August it handed McAfee Monday nights, where he'll sit on a desk that includes the man hired into Clark's old seat. ESPN looked at its roster and decided it would rather have one guy everywhere than everyone somewhere. The tank top won.
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South Carolina's quarterback has zero classes this semester. LaNorris Sellers finished his coursework early, so his entire fall academic load is an internship at a driving range, which he describes as “cutting grass and picking up balls.” He graduates in December and reportedly makes around $2 million in NIL while doing it. The graphic went viral with a lot of hand-wringing about education, and I'm taking the other side: good. The college part of college football has been a polite fiction for professional-track players since long before anyone got paid for it. His job is football. School will still be there at 40. This might be the most honest semester in the history of the sport. [SDS] |
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Meanwhile, a Buccaneers rookie is doing homework nobody assigned. A video went viral this week of Rueben Bain Jr., alone on the field after Bucs practice in a 100-degree heat index, dragging two blocking dummies 50 yards by himself and running a full hour of solo drills. Beat writers say he does this every day. This is the same Bain whose 30-and-seven-eighths-inch arms, the third-shortest ever measured on a defensive end at the combine, knocked him from No. 1 pick conversations down to 15th. He's out here beating the short-arm allegations one dummy at a time, and his reasoning is cold-blooded: half his college sacks came in the fourth quarter. “I know when I'm tired, the O-linemen are a little more tired than me.” [Yahoo] |
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The Browns have a quarterback controversy, because what would Cleveland football be without one. Cleveland lost 31-7 to the Bills on Saturday. Shedeur Sanders started, went 9 of 11 for 74 yards with a touchdown and a pick, and was the best player in orange. Deshaun Watson came off the bench to boos that started before his first snap, then called the booing “disrespectful” and “a little bit personal.” On that, he and the fans finally agree: it was never about the football. Sanders' drama this week was a Cleveland radio host claiming he has “keyboard warriors” on the payroll to argue with Browns reporters online, which would make him the first quarterback ever to outsource his own group chat. Todd Monken, asked to name a starter, declined. [NBC] |
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Speaking of circuses, Enes Kanter got escorted out of a WNBA game. The former NBA center, now a full-time provocateur, sat courtside at Fever-Sky in Chicago last night wearing a shirt designed to start an argument, having recently declared himself eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft as a stunt. Sky guard Natasha Cloud confronted him, he stood up with his arms spread, and security plus a handful of Sky players got between them before he was walked out of the building. I am not refereeing the underlying fight. That's your group chat's job. I'm just filing the league update: Indiana won by 23, and nobody spent one second today talking about the basketball. The WNBA still cannot have nice things. [WaPo] |
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Penn State's pledges had jobs. This broke last week and I'm still not over it. Pennsylvania's attorney general charged 14 people, 13 of them Penn State students, with running a cocaine trafficking operation out of two fraternity houses, and said that for some pledges, cutting and packaging cocaine “was an indoctrination into the fraternities.” The alleged ringleader, a 24-year-old reportedly nicknamed Pablo Pledgescobar, turned himself in and was denied bail. Court records trace more than $123,000 in payments, arranged over Cash App and Snapchat, which is exactly the operational security you'd expect from this crew. And one of the fourteen is a defendant's father, charged with obstruction. Dad got initiated too. [CBS] |
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Scottie Scheffler played the entire BMW Championship with hand, foot and mouth disease. He caught it from his kids the night after winning by eight in Memphis. It's a daycare illness. He is 30. He played all four rounds anyway with blisters on his hands, his feet, and in his throat, opened with a 72, then shot three straight rounds in the 60s to finish T-12, telling nobody until it was over. His self-review: “If I was smarter, maybe I would have pulled out, but I was playing so good.” This week at the Tour Championship he needs to finish 13th or better to pass Tiger Woods as golf's all-time money leader, a record Tiger has held for 26 years. The blisters are not expected to be a factor. [ESPN] |
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And something lives under Citi Field. A video from a Mets game shows a small furry arm reaching out of a hole in the concrete, over and over, collecting peanut shells from the fans above. At one point somebody handed it an entire hot dog, and the arm took it. The internet split evenly between rat and raccoon and the question was never resolved. Important historical context: in 2021, two Mets blamed a dugout altercation on “a rat or a raccoon.” That's two unresolved rat-or-raccoon incidents in five years for one franchise. At this point it deserves a bobblehead night. [B/R] |
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We are, Penn State
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The official accounts are in midseason form
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Programming note: college football returns Saturday, and the opener is North Carolina against TCU in Dublin, Ireland, because the sport heard “Week 0” and decided to treat it literally. Next issue, there will be actual football in here. Bring a friend. See you soon.
— Stew
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