Amazon is taking over as the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football this fall, and it has spent the past few months going big game hunting for its first ever NFL broadcast booth only to come up empty.
Al Michaels is reportedly close to signing on as their play-by-play man, but hasn’t inked a deal as he seemingly awaits Amazon finding an experienced name as an analyst alongside. There was a lot of buzz about Troy Aikman heading to Amazon after his season ended with Fox, but ESPN swooped in and has apparently signed Aikman on for 5 years and $90 million to be their new face of Monday Night Football — with a new play-by-play man joining him, potentially his current Fox partner Joe Buck.
Amazon has taken swings at big names currently residing in the NFL, but has been rebuffed by the likes of Sean McVay despite offering nine figures to leave the sidelines for the booth. On Sunday, Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported that Amazon has turned its attention away from poaching the NFL sidelines and towards ESPN’s top college football booth and will make a push to bring on Kirk Herbstreit — who has done a few Monday Night Football broadcasts when ESPN has had doubleheaders. Marchand notes that Herbstreit’s contract allows for him to pull double duty, doing college at ESPN while also calling NFL elsewhere.
While Herbstreit is under contract with ESPN for around $6-plus million per year, sources have told The Post that with the way his deal is written, he would be allowed to do the NFL with another entity, while continuing on college for ESPN.
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If Amazon and Herbstreit were to make a deal, ESPN, according to sources, would want the option to still use Herbstreit on some NFL games. While continuing as the home of “Monday Night Football,” it will extend to 25 games a year in the next two years.
It would be fascinating to see if Herbstreit could balance the rigors of calling Thursday night NFL games while also still doing ABC’s primetime game and College Gameday on Saturdays, but if anything, Amazon having Thursday nights would make it easier to compartmentalize rather than needing to bounce from college to the pros over the course of Saturday to Sunday. Marchand points out that there could be some lawyer fighting that takes place over whether ESPN has to let Herbstreit go to Amazon for NFL should he want to double dip, but the Worldwide Leader may also not have much of a choice if it doesn’t want to have to shuffle its top college football booth and road show.