Clay Travis Show: Pat McAfee Controversy, Obama’s Cheesecake Factory Feud & Football Picks

Clay Travis (0:00)

Welcome in Clay Travis Show. I hope all of you are having fantastic Wednesdays, wherever you may be around the country or in the world. I would always like to tell you, please click like and subscribe. The chat was fantastic in terms of all the different discussion of chain restaurants that we had yesterday. If you have a strong chain restaurant take, you should go back and watch yesterday's show, because I think I broke down basically every chain restaurant in America. We've got a lot to dive into today on the program, college football picks. Got a pick for you tonight, MTSU minus one and a half, I think is the current number that we will be discussing a bit. There you go. We lost, unfortunately, Western Kentucky, Big Red let us down. We are on MTSU against Kennesaw State tonight. I'll dive into more of these college football picks in a bit. NFL picks are also up and out. We had an awful, awful, very bad, disastrous weekend of NFL picks. I have got seven new NFL picks for all of you that are up there. We will dive into some of that as well. Many different stories that are out there that I want to dive into. And I actually want to start with a couple of new stories that came down just a little bit ago. First of all, Ernie Johnson has announced that he is retiring from Inside the NBA, that this will be his final year at the helm. I think that Inside the NBA is the best sports television show that has ever been made. I think that Ernie Johnson is the most seamless, the best sort of conductor of the orchestra. I have said this for a long time, Charles Barkley, most entertaining former athlete to ever do television. Great sports media personality. Ernie Johnson was the straight man who set up many of the best moments of Charles Barkley's media career. Ernie Johnson, consummate professional, really talented guy. Best of luck to him going forward. I know he's had health challenges. He just put up a video saying it's time, all time legend. Ernie Johnson, best wishes to him going forward. A lot of you have been reaching out, and we're going to get into a bunch of the cheesecake gate controversy here in a moment. But a lot of you have also been reaching out about the Pat McAfee controversy. Pat McAfee upset at his reception at the University of Utah, and he went on his show and talked about how he couldn't help but think about the Charlie Kirk incident, the shooting that happened at a different Utah campus, and he wasn't happy with the reception that he got on the campus. And here's what I would say in general.

I have long thought, and I hope I am wrong about this, that one of the most vulnerable to terror attack situations in modern America life is the live shows at big sporting events with huge crowds surrounding them. So, I know a lot of people in sports media have ripped Pat McAfee, and I just have to say, I totally get where Pat McAfee is coming from. I have been concerned for a very long time that in a live broadcast situation, it's virtually impossible to stop someone from trying to shoot you. And I know this is dark, and that people sometimes just want, you know, the sunshine stories. But I talked about this live on my show back when I did Sports Talk Radio with Fox Sports Radio, and Danny G., who's going to be on with me in a bit doing the Animal Thunderdome, which will be light and airy and fun. I remember the year that we were at the Minneapolis, the Mall of America.

William, if you can look up what year that was, I want to say it was like 2019, maybe right before everything got shut down, maybe it was 2018, right before, it was before COVID, the 2020 was a Miami Super Bowl. It might have been 2018 thereabouts.

We were broadcasting live, they put Radio Row in the Mall of America at the, for the Super Bowl that was going on up there. And it was, let's see, it was January of 2018, okay? So I was doing the Outkick the Coverage, Fox Sports Radio Morning Show, Danny G, Jason Martin was my producer. And we got there and we did the show live, as we often did when there was almost no one else there. I was live at 5 a.m. Central, it's pitch black outside, it's freezing. We were staying in the Mall of America for part of it, then I had to walk from another hotel. I just remember 4.2 in the morning, it's minus 20 degrees or whatever the heck it was, in January of 2018, trying to walk across that parking lot and just thinking, what in the world? What choices have I made with my life that this is the scenario that we're in? And I was there on Monday. And I remember they had, it was wide open, the whole mall was open. There was virtually no security, and everyone was set there to do live Sports Talk Radio. And that first day, I turned to my producers, I turned to Danny G, I bet he'll remember it. And I said, we are just absolute sitting ducks here.