Pat McAfee Quit The Colts Because Ryan Grigson Scolded Him About An Instagram Pic

Pat McAfee quit the Indianapolis Colts for the same reason he quit Barstool, the former NFL punter explained on his podcast Monday.

"I don’t think I want to make money for you guys anymore."

The story is this:

In 2016, the Colts get blown out of Thanksgiving Day and the next Monday McAfee gets called into the office by Ryan Grigson, who was then the Colts GM and who had once told McAfee he was the “lowest thing in the organization.”

"“Maybe this is an olive branch,” McAfee remembered thinking. “If it wasn’t for me, we’re shut out on national TV. I’m leading the league in almost everything, I don’t think I’ve given up a return yard in maybe two months, three months, I’m the No. 2 jersey seller for the Colts, I’m doing a lot of charity work. Maybe this is Grigson being, ‘You know, I fined you three to four times before about dumb (expletive), but I would like to be friends.'”"

It wasn’t.

Rather, Grigson was confronting McAfee for the following post on Instagram:

Grigson told McAfee to sit down.

"I’m like, ‘Woah.’ Immediately. … There was already in my head an idea of me being sick of making money for Ryan Grigson and the Colts operation at the time. It was at that moment that I realized, ‘I’m (expletive) done here.’”"

Grigson was upset about the location of the photo. McAfee had broken a rule by taking a photo in a “football room.”

"“He pulls out my contract, opens it up, goes to a clause. ‘Since this isn’t your first offense, I can fine you a game check for this,’” McAfee recalled Grigson saying. “You only get 17 game checks in your entire salary, so if you want to look up what that was, it was $100,000 almost. I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘Is that a football room?’ I said, ‘Well the title is an equipment room. There’s footballs in there I guess.’ He goes, ‘Why do you have to be such a smartass? I can fine you anything I want. This is why we’re losing.’ This is why we lost to the Steelers, he tells me.”"

McAfee then went off on Grigson, as he describes in detail, before going down to Chuck Pagano’s office and telling him he can go perform an unnatural act on himself, too, if he had anything to do with it.

So it worked out, then, that McAfee was, in fact, done there. And he says, all things considered, it was a pretty similar type situation at Barstool.

"“This type of feeling, it’s going to be the death of me. Because (Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy) wanted me to come back … and I just couldn’t sleep. Dave was very nice, but by that point I was already like, ‘Man, I don’t want to make money for the business people.’ Just like when he said, ‘Sit down’ in the chair to me, I don’t want to (expletive) make money for this guy anymore. It’ll be the death of me, it honestly will be, but at least I sleep good at night.”"