Pat McAfee had to know the answer from Dan Orlovsky.
Orlovsky appeared on McAfee’s show on ESPN and YouTube on Tuesday.
After discussing fallout from Falcons-Eagles, Bryce Young getting benched in Carolina and Derek Carr having a great start to the season, McAfee hit him with the controversial question.
“Did ESPN tell you to delete that tweet or no? I just need to know,” McAfee said.
He was referring to a tweet that Orlovsky sent during the Paris Olympics when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif dominated Italian fighter Angela Carini after it came out that Khelif had been barred from a previous tournament after Russian-led IBA claimed that a test revealed she had XY chromosomes.
In the middle of a broader online tempest about the matter, Orlovsky tweeted, “Protect our daughters” — and later removed the social media post.
After McAfee’s question, Orlovsky laughed, sighed and thought about it for a second before answering, “ESPN did not, nor did anyone associated with ESPN tell me to delete that tweet.”
McAfee said that he understood why Orlovsky deleted the tweet because he was thinking that “I could lose my job” and said, “Just want to let you know — we think you’re a good dude, Dan. I think you obviously made a little whoopsie there in that particular situation, and we move on.”
There had been confusion in the matter, because Orlovsky had seemingly addressed the deleted tweet in an interview with Barrett Media.
“When you’re an employee of a big company, your social media page doesn’t just get to be your social media page,” Orlovsky told the outlet last month. “That’s a fantasy, so you have to represent yourself and the company that you work for in the proper way.”
However, Orlovsky later said that he was referring to his general social media usage, and not specifically about deleting the tweet about Khelif.
“Wanted to provide some clarity—been a long last 24 hours. My quote from this week’s
@Barrett_Media interview was in response to a question about, from a big picture, how I generally approach social media,” Orlovsky tweeted in the aftermath of the controversy.
“Neither the question nor the answer were centered on the specific deleted tweet from a couple weeks ago. I can see why people would connect those dots, but it’s simply not true. Plain and simple.”
Khelif went on to win gold in her weight class.