Over the past week, multiple reports have swirled around Troy Aikman’s standing at ESPN.
ESPN will broadcast the Super Bowl for the first time in February, and it may serve as the grand finale for Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who have shared a booth since 2002 and took over Monday Night Football in 2022. While Joe Buck inked a lucrative ESPN extension last month, Aikman’s contract will expire at the conclusion of this NFL season.
Everyone from Bill Simmons and Stephen A. Smith to Chad Ochocino and Jerry Jones has weighed in on the matter, and Charles Barkley joined the chorus while appearing on 97.5 The Fanatic’s Unfiltered on Wednesday.
“I’m very disappointed in Troy Aikman, honestly,” Barkley said. “It’s not Joe Buck’s job to get him a deal. Like, he can’t tell them to give him a deal. Now, if he wants to talk to Joe privately, that’s fine. But why are you mad? They gave Joe a deal. It looks like they don’t want to give you a deal, which they don’t have to give you a deal. But you don’t have to drag Joe Buck into it. Like, it ain’t his job.”
“They’ve been together 25 years,” Barkley continued. “I’m pretty sure they love working together, but maybe they want to go in a different direction. But I don’t understand why you would be mad at Joe Buck. He ain’t negotiating the contract. When he went there first, you didn’t negotiate with him. Remember? He left the network first.”
Barkley was almost assuredly alluding to when Aikman departed Fox for ESPN in February 2022, and Buck followed suit in March 2022. And based on the rest of his commentary, it sounds like Charles Barkley has been keeping up on his sports media news between golf rounds, considering Troy Aikman has not publicly thrown Joe Buck under the bus.
Last week, Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports reported that “tension” between Aikman and Buck spilled over into “an argument” before they called Monday Night Football on Oct. 12. The following day, Aikman appeared on KTCK The Ticket in Dallas and did not refute the report.
“There’s probably a time and a place for all that to be discussed,” Aikman said. “I don’t know if now is the time. I don’t know if it’s hard to figure out kind of what’s happened. I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens. But I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this year does hold and the Super Bowl and all that and where my next landing spot might be.”
Later that night, Aikman painted a bleak picture of his ESPN future to Jimmy Traina, saying, “It just seems to be where they’re going — that they’re gonna go in a different direction because there’s been no talks, no contract negotiations. We’re in a Super Bowl year. The Super Bowl is Feb. 14. My contract ends in March. It just doesn’t seem logical that if they were gonna keep me, something wouldn’t be in place before that.”
What Charles Barkley couldn’t have known, however, is what Dylan Byers revealed in his bombshell Puck report published Wednesday night.
According to Byers, citing an unnamed source with direct knowledge, Troy Aikman has become “increasingly cold, difficult, short, making comments” in recent weeks. And Aikman felt Buck had “f*cked him over.”
Another source told Byers that Aikman feels that Buck and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro committed “the ultimate act of betrayal” because neither party informed him of Buck’s new contract before Andrew Marchand reported it in September.
Buck, meanwhile, appeared on 97.5 The Fanatic in late September and advocated for ESPN to retain Aikman.
“I’m pretty well on record, having begged out of my last years at Fox to follow him to ESPN, where I stand on all that,” Buck said. “I legitimately love the guy like a brother. We’re basically the same age. I’m 57, he’s 59. We’ve both been through divorce. We both are girl dads. Twenty-five years, you’re sharing a lot of life together.”
To Barkley’s point, Buck also established a boundary and politely reminded everyone that it’s not part of his job’s scope to meddle in Aikman’s negotiations with ESPN.
“I hope so,” Buck said. “Both of us were up. It wasn’t like we were doing some National Signing Day, where we walk in arm-in-arm and then sign contracts at the same time. We’ve always kind of kept that stuff separate. I’m obviously hopeful, to say the least, that something gets done. But that’s kind of his world and ESPN’s world, and I’ve gotta mind my own yard in that stuff.”
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