The average NFL player, even non-household names, sacrifices so much to make it big. You make football your life, devote yourself to the game, and hope against all hopes that a franchise picks you. And then you play, and you get injured. And then you play and you get injured again. Over and over for the length of your career, however short it may be. Worst-case scenario, it’s a career-ender, or it gives you CTE. Otherwise, you will probably succumb to aches and pains that’ll have you acting like an old man when you reach your 30s.

And so you retire, at an eyebrow-raising young age, and then what do you do? You surrender your life to football. What do you have left? Well, when Pat McAfee retired at 29, he had a clear plan moving forward. He went to work for Barstool Sports, and when that didn’t work out, he set up his own company and now he’s thriving! But that just covers his professional life. He’s still a relatively young man. What’s going on in his professional life?

Well, he’s a family man, having gotten married to his girlfriend Samantha Ludy in 2020. They have just one child together, their daughter Mackenzie Lynn McAfee, born on May 4, 2023.

A happy little family, but it wasn’t an easy journey getting here. The couple suffered two heartbreaking miscarriages on the road to this birth. You might’ve noticed the rainbows on their Instagram post celebrating the baby’s birth. That’s because Mackenzie Lynn is a double rainbow baby, i.e. one born after two losses, the rainbow that came after the rain. The couple went through a painstaking IVF process to get to this point.

The miscarriages caused Samantha McAfee to lose both her Fallopian tubes, meaning she could not conceive naturally anymore. “So after about 150 shots, a surgery, a transfer, countless blood tests, waiting on embryos, genetic testing, hoping for a big fat positive on that pee stick… we are beyond happy and blessed to announce our double rainbow baby!” she wrote when announcing their pregnancy back then.

Their story is an inspiration to all those couples struggling with infertility, and we wish their family well. It’s already clear Pat McAfee’s willing to do everything it takes to take care of them.

Is Pat McAfee the hardest-working man in sports media?

Pat McAfee was already busy at the start of the year. He does The Pat McAfee Show Monday to Friday and has been doing so since 2018. You can make assumptions about the research and behind-the-scenes work that goes into that. Picking out and lining up guests too is not a straightforward task. So does he have his weekends off? Not a chance.

He’ll often make appearances on College GameDay on Saturdays on ESPN and come in with his trademark incisive takes. And starting this year he has a job on Sunday too, appearing on NFL GameDay Morning regularly.

It got to the point that Kurt Warner joked about him, “He’s going to work every day of the week, isn’t he?“. You might think it’s all to provide for his family, but he’s loaded already. To start with, his career earnings at the time of his retirement at 29 stood at more than $15 million. A monumental amount for the average person to imagine, especially for someone who claims to be a “blue-collar American.”

With his current net worth estimated at $60 million (unofficially), he could retire and still have multigenerational wealth. So why is he the hardest-working man in sports media? For the love of the game, we have to imagine.