Jason Kelce’s bosses at ESPN have opted not to punish the former Eagles star for smashing a fan’s phone to the ground in a furious confrontation, according to reports.
Kelce quickly went viral on Saturday when he traveled to Penn State University to appear on the network’s College GameDay program.
He was walking through a crowd of people when one man called his brother Travis a ‘f****t’ for dating Taylor Swift, leading to an angry Kelce grabbing his phone.
He smashed it to the ground and shouted back at the man, ‘Who is the f****t now?’, leading to a police investigation which is still ongoing.
It appears, though, that Kelce will avoid internal punishment at ESPN, with Front Office Sports reporting that the network’s bosses are not planning any further action for their newest NFL analyst.
At the start of the broadcast, he apologized to viewers for ‘falling short’ of his usual levels of ‘common decency and respect’.
‘I think everybody has seen on social media what happened this week,’ Kelce said. ‘Listen, I’m not happy with anything that took place. I’m not proud of it.
‘In a heated moment I chose to greet hate with hate and I just don’t think that’s a productive thing, I really don’t. I don’t think it leads to discourse and it’s the right way to go about things. In that moment I fell down to a level that I shouldn’t have.
Kelce has been a hugely popular addition to Monday Night Football, appearing weekly in the wake of his retirement from the Philadelphia Eagles earlier this year.
On this week’s MNF show, Kelce offered a live on-air apology for the incident over the weekend, which split fans online, with many claiming he shouldn’t have had to say sorry for the interaction with the fan.
‘The bottom line is, I try to live my life by the golden rule, that’s what I’ve always been taught; I try to treat people with common decency and respect, and I’m gonna keep doing that moving forward.
‘Even though I fell short this week, I’m gonna do that moving forward and continue to do that.’
Several social media users, including Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, were left furious at his apology before the Chiefs vs Bucs game, with some hitting out at ESPN and accusing the network of making it happen.
Portnoy said on X: ‘The only thing Kelce should have apologized for is maybe using the F word. But anybody with a brain knows he was just repeating what was said to him. If he called him a p***y, b***h, a**hole that woulda been the word he used. Golden rule was applied perfectly. He treated that guy exactly how he deserved to be treated.’
