Pat McAfee Breaks His Silence On Ninja's Ignorant Comments

Last year, Ninja accidentally caused a bit of controversy when he made some comments regarding NFL kickers that were seen as ignorant by many people. One of these was former NFL pro and current podcast host, Pat McAfee. On a recent episode of his show, McAfee brought the whole debacle up again, but elaborated on his opinions on Ninja's "ignorant" comments.

"This is just like the Ninja situation," said McAfee. "Ninja bashed kickers, like, months ago. And he and I actually had an interaction. I followed him, he followed me. And then it got recycled on the internet here just a couple days ago. About Ninja basically saying, like, he doesn't know how teams have kickers that just miss, or something like that."

For those of you who are completely lost, here's the deal: last year, Ninja tweeted, "I'll never understand how college and NFL football teams allow kickers that just.... miss... kicks. I feel like there has to be pools of kickers in the USA that won't miss simple kicks ... Would love opinions on this."

And boy, did he ever get some opinions. Ninja's original tweet was deleted, but many of the pithy responses that followed are still available to see. Ninja received quite a bit of backlash at the time, even from sports pros. 

For instance, the Denver Broncos' Casey Krueger responded, telling Ninja that things were much "more nuanced" than his comments would suggest. Furthermore, he said that well-trained teams "bail each other out when one is slightly off." Ninja seemed to agree with this point.

On his podcast, McAfee recounted a bit of the original back and forth, wherein pro gamer DuckyTheGamer pointed out the hypocrisy in Ninja's original statement. DuckyTheGamer did this by reframing Ninja's original tweet and repeating it back to him, only replacing the sports talk with Fortnite references.

In another infamous tweet that has apparently since been deleted, Ninja said, "This is the sh**tiest reply ever. Fortnite requires movement, editing, building, rotating, and hitting shots. There are not 'positions' in Fortnite. A kickers job is LITERALLY to kick. Horrible analogy, kind of embarrassing."

Even PewDiePie, who is no stranger to accidentally putting his foot in his mouth, criticized Ninja's NFL comments. Not only that, but he came down on Ninja's response to DuckyTheGamer, feeling that referring to Ducky's response as "embarrassing" was a bit much. Pewds said that it felt like Ninja was simply "projecting what he said as kind of embarrassing onto someone else." In summation, PewDiePie said that Ninja just didn't make any sense to him.

As McAfee pointed out on his recent podcast, Ninja did his best to explain why he thought it was different. According to McAfee, people have recently been talking about this incident again, so he felt the need to address it. However, he also took the time to address Ninja's recent successes. McAfee mentioned that Ninja had "just got broken off for another 30 million [dollars]." 

This is a reference to the rumors that Ninja was offered double his original Mixer contract if he agreed to move over to Facebook Gaming with the closure of Microsoft's Mixer platform. It remains to be seen what Ninja will be doing in the future, but it certainly seems like he's going to set off on a different path from what Facebook and Microsoft intended.

In contrast, McAfee's comments really illuminate what where the issue may have come from in the first place. Quite simply, as McAfee points out, neither he nor Ninja have a proper frame of reference for how the other person's job works.

McAfee seems to be of the opinion that the two of them are simply from different walks of life and have very different experiences. He explained that there is a lot of pressure that goes into playing professional football, but he also admits that he knows there's a lot of skill that goes into competitive gaming. Ultimately, McAfee points out that the two professions are very different things.

McAfee concluded his thoughts on the subject with a shoutout to Ninja's continued success. He said, "There is a lot of things that go into why kicking a football is a difficult task. I'm not saying it's more difficult than becoming a Fortnite stud, because there's millions and millions of people that play Fortnite and there's only one Ninja, so I'm never gonna discount that or discredit that."

In fact, McAfee says at one point that he would love to have Ninja on his show sometime so that they can discuss their differences and air out any grievances. This echoes his original interaction with Ninja, which shows that it was a sincere offer on McAfee's part. Hopefully they can do that at some point in the future. It seems like an earnest invitation and it could help clear the air between the two men's fanbases.