PAT McAfee stunned the sports world when he left an All-Pro career in the NFL aged 29 to become a media personality.

The Indianapolis Colts punter was due to earn nearly $6 million over the following two seasons when he made a surprise decision to work with Barstool Sports in 2017.

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But that calculated gamble has paid off handsomely with McAfee having emerged as one of the most popular – and best paid – sports broadcasters in the United States.

Earlier this year, McAfee joined ESPN in a five-year deal worth a whopping $85 million, which works out around $17 million per year.

The agreement includes his self-titled daily show, which will air on ESPN’s cable channel, YouTube and ESPN+ as well as his weekly spots on College GameDay.

Such is his influence that McAfee, 36, walked away from a four-year deal with FanDuel worth a cool $120 million to move to ESPN.

Here is a look at McAfee’s incredible rise from NFL superstar to WWE personality and sports media multi-platform sensation.

Getting his kicks with Colts

After starring as a field kicker for West Virginia, McAfee was selected in the seventh round in the 2009 NFL Draft by the Colts.

McAfee was expecting to play as a kicker for the Colts but was stunned when told he would be the next punter.

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He went to an empty high school field the next day with his dad and a bag of footballs.

“We had to figure out how to (expletive) punt,” McAfee recalled.

Over the following eight seasons, McAfee honed his craft to become the greatest punter in franchise history, with a punting gross average of 46.4 yards.

He was also skilled at onside kicks, quick-witted enough to pull off fake punts and strong enough to tackle opposing players.

After earning $4.77 million during his first five seasons with the Colts, McAfee signed a five-year, $14 million contract in 2014.

Such was his outsized personality that McAfee began to make a name for himself as a standup comic, local radio personality and social media presence on Twitter.

McAfee was named to the Pro Bowl in 2014 and 2016 but knee injuries began to take their toll, with three operations in four years.

The NFL star also became frustrated with general manager Ryan Grigson, leading to his move to quit the league at the height of his career.

Becoming sports media superstar

McAfee’s first move into sports media was with Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports in 2017.

But after making a name for himself at Barstool with his podcasts and digital content, McAfee abruptly left the company a year later for undisclosed financial reasons.

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As a free agent, the offers soon came flooding in for McAfee, joining ESPN as a college football analyst in 2019.

He also launched his hugely popular three-hour digital show on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio channel as well as on YouTube.

Such was its success that he secured a monster $30 million-per-year sponsorship deal with FanDuel before he took his talents to ESPN earlier this year.

McAfee is now considered one of the most important members of the ESPN family alongside the likes of Stephen A. Smith, the Manning brothers, Troy Aikman, and Joe Buck.

McAfee’s daily show debuted on ESPN earlier this week, on tape delay in a bid to combat swearing.

The show even with a disclaimer apologizing in advance for any NSFW words.

The pressure on McAfee in particular to succeed at ESPN is immense.

Many sports fans on social media pointed the finger at McAfee and his contract, amid ESPN’s mass layoffs earlier this summer.

Speaking on Twitter, the former NFL punter said he was “reflecting about our show’s journey while I was getting murdered on the internet today.”

He added: “We’re very pumped to be joining ESPN and our goal is that ‘Mass exits’ are never a thing again (and) we hope to help that.

“Obviously that’s a lofty goal but, that’s how I truly look at life.”

Living childhood dream in WWE

One of McAfee’s dreams growing up was to become a professional wrestler.

“If it wasn’t for finding out that my right leg could kick a ball really far, which is what I did, I am 100 per cent certain that I would be attempting to be or would be a professional wrestler,” McAfee said.

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McAfee first joined WWE in 2018 as part of the NXT TakeOver pre-show panel in a multiyear deal.

In 2020, McAfee’s childhood dream came true when he made his in-ring debut at NXT TakeOver: XXX against Adam Cole.

He amazed fans with his displays of athleticism, including leaping off the top rope.

In 2021, McAfee joined the WWE Smackdown commentary team.

But he was forced to leave the job last year after landing a full-time gig to co-host ESPN College GameDay.

McAfee had made cameos at SummerSlam 2022 and WrestleMania 39 but it seems his time in WWE has come to an end, at least for now.

In March, McAfee became a father for the first time with the birth of his daughter Mackenzie.

For all his success, McAfee is hugely grateful for the opportunities he had been given since leaving the NFL.

“I’m not supposed to be here. There’s no way I’m supposed to be here,” he told Sports Illustrated.

“I’m very happy with what I do.I enjoy the stupid decisions that my friends and I make. 

“Everything for me is either a learn or a win. I just keep moving forward and that’s about it, honestly.

“I think I’m the luckiest guy on Earth.”

As the music streaming business matures, the way people listen to music could determine how artists get paid. Sitting back and letting a streaming service choose a song will result in a lower royalty than choosing the song yourself, if this week’s news of a new streaming model is any indication.

It’s not a phobia toward algorithms that’s driving the change. Rather, the approach rewards those artists who create the most active engagement. Songs that play in the background are deemed to be less valuable.

On Tuesday, French music streamer Deezer and Universal Music Group announced a partnership to reinvent how Deezer calculates UMG’s streaming royalties. The partnership will “[reduce] the economic influence of algorithmic programming” and reward “engaging content” with greater royalties, according to the companies’ press releases.

When they say, “algorithmic programming,” they mean the streaming service’s personalized recommendations about what song will play next. That’s a more passive, lean-back approach to listening than hunting and pecking on the app’s user interface to choose a song.

At some point between the launch of internet radio platforms and the present battle for better royalties, passive listening got a bad rap. What has the world come to, some people fret, when dreaded algorithms are deciding what music gets heard? What gives an algorithm such an important role in determining how royalties will be paid?

But algorithms are a common way to stream music. When given an on-demand streaming service, people often let an algorithm do the hard work of picking the next song. A 2021 MusicWatch survey found Spotify Premium users spent 25% of their time in “lean-back” listening rather than “lean-in” listening. That figure rose to 31% for Apple Music users and 32% for Amazon Prime Music users. In all, 48% of time spent listening to music was “lean back” listening on streaming services, broadcast radio and satellite radio.

Algorithms also drive helpful products such as Spotify’s Discover Mode, a promotional tool that allows artists and labels to find new listeners in return for a lower royalty rate. It works by increasing the likelihood a song will be recommended to a listener. It’s popular, too. From the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, Discovery Mode had a 98% customer retention rate, Charlie Hellman, Spotify’s vp/global head of music product said during the company’s 2022 investor day presentation.

When a streaming service does personalization well, it adds great value to a listening experience. Pandora was revolutionary when it launched in 2005 because it had a spooky sense of what people wanted to hear. Its Music Genome Project, a proprietary technology that classifies recordings’ various musical traits, gave it the ability to pick the right songs based on a history of giving other songs a “thumb up” or “thumb down” vote. Pandora took away the effort in digging for songs and provided a much broader catalog than broadcast or satellite radio.

Today’s music streaming services are superior to their predecessors — and their own previous iterations — specifically because they have mastered passive listening. Consider how far Spotify has come since it was launched. Spotify used to recommend songs based on a user’s social network — kind of an “if your friend likes it, you’ll like it” approach to song-picking. But it wasn’t a good listening experience. Spotify’s decision to acquire music intelligence startup The Echo Nest in 2014 was the cornerstone for a new approach to providing a personalized listening experience.

The proliferation of smart speakers only adds to the need for algorithmic listening. About two-thirds of U.S. smart speaker owners wanted to own the devices to discover new songs, according to a 2022 Edison Research survey, and their share of time spent listening to audio through a smart speaker increased 400% over the previous five years. The joy of owning a smart speaker is allowing the device and streaming service to do all the work — it’s passive listening at its best.

Most Americans use their favorite streaming service when doing things around the home such as cleaning, relaxing, cooking, eating and entertaining guests, according to the same MusicWatch study. Most people stream music when exercising. More than half of people also use their favorite streaming service when driving, although satellite and broadcast radio were preferred in the car over streaming. Streaming service Songza, acquired by Google in 2014, was built on the premise that people chose music for moods and activities. That approach to curation has since been adopted by most — if not all — streaming services.

The UMG-Deezer partnership is evidence that background listening is on its way to getting a demotion. Deezer will remove tracks of white noise, which account for 2% of its streams, from the royalty pool. That leaves more royalties for professional artists who depend on streaming to earn a living. Throughout the year, UMG has been calling out “functional music” — a term that has come to mean low-cost or generic music built for moods or activities — and drawing a distinction between artists who draw people to streaming services and sounds that people play in the background.

Taylor Swift and Drake may rule the charts, but functional music is mainstream, too. Of U.S. music streamers who listen to playlists, many of them listen to playlists for white noise (36%), rain sounds (45%) and relaxation (61%), according to a 2023 MIDiA Research survey. In recent years, streaming services have broadened their playlists and radio stations to address the fact that consumers want a variety of sounds.

Artists with small followings will get less, too. Deezer will “boost” the royalties of “professional” artists with at least 1,000 streams per month by a minimum of 500 unique listeners. That will relegate hobbyists and artists early in their career development to a different tier. Exactly how many artists will be affected isn’t clear, but Deezer says just 2% of artists on the platform have more than 1,000 monthly unique listeners.

UMG and Deezer aren’t exactly taking an innovative stance, however. The music industry — at least in the United States — has already determined that active, on-demand listening is more valuable than passive, non-interactive listening. The Deezer-UMG partnership merely codifies for an on-demand service what is standard at internet radio. In the United States, non-interactive internet radio streams from the likes of Pandora pay 0.24 cents per ad-supported stream (and 0.3 cents per subscription streams). That’s less than any on-demand stream from a premium streaming service such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

In effect, a streaming service pays less for non-interactive streams because it gives the listener less value than on-demand services. To qualify for the lower royalty rate, a non-interactive streaming service cannot have the same robust features as an interactive one. At Deezer, a listener can stream any song from any artist any number of times. They can listen to playlists and build playlists, too. They can listen to songs shared by friends through SMS or social media. That’s all lean-in listening, and it’s more valuable because people will pay $11 a month to do it.

Until now, on-demand services’ standard pro-rata model hasn’t separated passive from active listening. When labels negotiated licensing deals with streaming services, they have always treated one stream the same as any other stream. A stream from a user-curated playlist is treated the same as a stream from an algorithmically created radio station. Whether the listener actively hits the play button to listen to a particular track isn’t taken into account. Right or wrong, that’s how the pie has been divvied up.

A couple of decades into the life of the pro-rata system, Deezer shows there is a greater willingness to treat active listening differently than passive listening. MIDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan called this demotion “a very welcome and long overdue move” that will “disincentivis[e] the commodification of consumption by rewarding active listening.” There’s certainly a logical argument to be made here: The artists people actively seek out arguably provide the most value — give the streaming service the most foot traffic, so to speak — while less popular artists play the important but less financially valuable role of giving breadth and depth to music catalogs.

Time will tell if and how other streaming services follow Deezer’s lead. An alternative already exists: In 2022, Warner Music Group adopted the user-centric model that SoundCloud rolled out to independent artists the prior year. That system pays royalties based on an individual subscriber’s listening rather than pooling all subscribers’ fees into a larger pool. So, a subscriber who listens to out-of-the-mainstream or independent artists is assured their money is not going to popular artists.

Over the next few years, labels and services are likely to experiment with different approaches to calculating streaming royalties. But regardless of how the dust settles, streaming services and rights holders should respect what passive listening brings to their listeners.

Tohono O’odham citizens now have access to wireless internet options thanks to a partnership the Tohono O’odham Utility Authority established with Baicells Technologies to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to villages across the largely rural Tohono O’odham Nation. 

“Understanding our remote location and lack of service by any existing carriers, we knew it was up to us to address this issue of broadband access,” Kristan Johnson, the operations manager for the Tohono O’odham Utility Authority (TOUA), said in a press release. TOUA has been offering internet services since 1998. 

The Tohono O’odham Nation is 4,460 square miles, about the size of Connecticut, and roughly 28,000 Tohono O’odham people live on its tribal lands in southwestern Arizona. 

The Tohono O’odham Nation is divided into 11 districts that are made up of 72 villages. Due to the rural conditions, the tribe has faced challenges bringing access to high-speed internet in many parts of tribal land.

The tribe has largely relied on simple WiFi connectivity set up in limited locations, and residents relied on internet speeds as low as 2 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload, which often left the community unable to access critical service. 

With the help of federal funding, the TOUA has been able to overhaul and upgrade its infrastructure, and has been able to build out its network plan through wireless connection.

TOUA reached out to Baicells to partner with them to get the network established, but according to the press release, the tribe is the one behind the wheel because they planned, deployed and now operate the network.

“We have experience and a track record of solving these types of challenges for our communities,” Johnson said. “A private network that we can manage on our own was a great fit since we are very accustomed to operating our own infrastructure.” 

The TOUA already operates key utility infrastructures like electricity and water, Johnson said. 

“In today’s age, internet access is just another utility,” she added.

The tribe launched its project to build the wireless network in 2020, according to the press release, and started testing Baicells technology in 2021. Since then, the tribe successfully deployed a dual-band private 4G LTE network. 

Johnson said that they are still working to build out a fiber optic network, which is expected to be completed in 2024, and the wireless system allows customers to have access to the internet until then.

The Tohono O’odham Nation has approximately 50 base stations set up across its land, and it has the potential to serve an estimated 3,000 homes. 

“The primary objective of this initiative is to enhance communications and access to content and educational services, with the high-speed connectivity provided by this network,” Minchul Ho, Americas CEO at Baicells, said in a press release. 

“Baicells core mission is empowering unserved communities and bridging the digital divide with affordable solutions,” Ho added. “The success of the partnership with the TOUA showcases the company’s dedication and commitment to this mission.”

According to Baicells, the Tohono O’odham Nation is able to maintain tribal sovereignty over its network infrastructure by leveraging a private LTE network. 

The Tohono O’odham Utility Authority was interested in getting service across the community sooner rather than later, said Tony Eigen, vice president of global marketing for Baicells.

“They knew they could do this with a wireless kind of network,” Eigen said, and Baicells is helping the Tribe get connected through the wireless technology they provide.

Eigen said Baicells went out to the Tohono O’odham Nation this summer to work with the TOUA to set up more towers in their network, and the tribes’ choice to go wireless gave them the ability to get their communities connected faster.

Since the project launched, Eigen said they’ve been able to cover a large portion of the community, unlike fiber optics, which takes longer to build out and costs much more.

Customers will have a transmitter set up on their house that talks to the radio transmitters and then broadcasts WiFi in the house, Eigden said, which is vastly different from digging and laying down fiber cables. 

For example, a mile of fiber costs roughly $5,000, but connecting a similar amount of endpoints using wireless networks costs only about $500.

“The cost is very much based on the population density that you’re trying to serve,” he added. “There is major differences in those two approaches.”