NFL announcing duo Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who helped revive Monday Night Football after moving to ESPN in 2022, now find themselves at the center of one of the NFL’s dishiest off-field dramas.
Money, as usual, is seen as the root cause.
Buck last month agreed to a contract renewal with ESPN parent Disney, with the 5-year deal reportedly worth $108 million. He has branched out to non-sports fare, guest-hosting Good Morning America and hosting streaming quiz show Sports Jeopardy!
Aikman, meanwhile, has yet to re-sign, with his current contract set to expire after the Super Bowl, which ESPN will carry for the first time next February. (Sibling broadcast network ABC will have the big game for the first time since 2006.)
The pair, who called games together on Fox for 20 years, are said to have clashed over the differing contract status. Front Office Sports last week detailed a heated exchange between the two witnessed by a number of colleagues prior to last Monday’s L.A. Rams-Buffalo Bills game.
Aikman did not push back on the report when asked about it during an appearance on Dallas-Fort worth radio station KTCK-FM. “Well, I think there’s probably a time and a place for all that to be discussed,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t know if now is the time. I don’t know that it’s hard to figure out kind of what happened.”
The former Dallas Cowboys quarterback said he plans to continue as MNF analyst through the end of the season. “I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this year does hold, with the Super Bowl and all that and where my next landing spot may be.”
Meadowlark Media co-founder Dan Le Batard, who had his own stormy relationship with ESPN during a decade as a host there, said on his daily podcast Friday that he was stunned by Aikman’s comments. He said he interpreted them as “‘I’m not coming back.’ And it’s before the Super Bowl! They’ve got to work together!” Le Batard also blamed Buck for the reported sequence of events. “I can understand where Troy would be very upset if Joe Buck just negotiated his own deal.”
Disney put Buck and Aikman onstage last May toward the top of its upfront presentation to advertisers, an event that also featured remarks from Josh D’Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger as CEO last February. As chief exec, D’Amaro has reaffirmed that ESPN, rumored over the years to be a spinoff candidate, is very much a part of the corporate portfolio.
Prior to the past week’s bumps, Buck and Aikman had been having a smooth ride. The pair’s jump from Fox injected restored energy and credibility to MNF, with many sports media pundits reaffirming their view that the duo is the best in the business. Before 2022, the onetime prime-time pioneer cycled through a succession of announcers and received increasingly middling games on the NFL schedule, which led to stagnating ratings and frustrated ad buyers.
Times have changed at ESPN, however, thanks to a sweeping deal with the NFL that exchanged a 10% stake in the network for control of media assets including NFL Network. The ownership ties open up intriguing possibilities, with speculation centering on numerous candidates to succeed Aikman.
Two of the most intriguing names being bandied about are Peyton Manning and Travis Kelce. The former’s company, Omaha Productions, is part-owned by the NFL and Manning is a ubiquitous media presence on top of his Hall of Fame playing credentials. Kelce is still playing for the Kansas City Chiefs but is of course even better known to the masses as Taylor Swift’s ball and chain.
An ESPN rep declined to comment when contacted by Deadline. After news of Buck’s re-upping surfaced last month, the company issued a statement saying it was determined to focus on its historic Super Bowl broadcast, which Disney is hyping with a year-long promotional blitz. “To that end, we won’t be addressing talent contract specifics publicly before the Super Bowl,” the statement said.
Deadline encountered the same sentiment from multiple sources in the ESPN orbit in recent days, who noted that the big game is nearly four months away, leaving time for some climate change. “A lot can happen between now and then,” one said.
Despite those efforts to calm the waters, a fairly broad consensus has formed that Aikman is a short-timer at ESPN.
“It sure feels like goodbye, doesn’t it?” said Bryan Curtis of the Ringer during an appearance on Jimmy Traina’s Underscore Media podcast Friday. “It sure does,” Traina replied.
They both went on to marvel at the turn of events for MNF and the tensions in the broadcast booth “spilling out into the public in this weird, weird way,” as Curtis put it. ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro’s “biggest win before he resigned the NFL deal,” he added, was “getting Joe and Troy away from Fox because it solved the problem. It was over. … And for the drama to be located over there now, what a turnaround that is.”