After two years as an analyst on Monday Night Football for ESPN, Booger McFarland is done, though not without some regrets. McFarland will remain in a prominent role on ESPN’s football coverage and isn’t sweating his demotion, but wishes that ESPN gave he and Joe Tessitore more time to feel out their tag-team relationship.
“You go through your growing pains and the only way you grow through them is on the job,” McFarland said in an interview on Thursday with the New York Post. “It happens to be one of those jobs that you have to do it in front of 15 million people.
“I just wish that you have an opportunity to, as we do in football, you make mistakes, you learn from them and you correct them and you move on. That is the one thing that I wish we had an opportunity to do, but we don’t.”
McFarland infamously began his MNF tenure in a monstrous go kart of a broadcast chair that became affectionately (or resentfully) known as the Booger Mobile, and also, unfortunately, ruined the view of many a fan in the front few rows of the lower level of NFL stadiums.
“Overall, when you talk about broadcasting, it was tough for a three-man booth to be as cohesive as it could be with one of the people 75 yards away,” McFarland told Andrew Marchand of working with Tessitore and Jason Witten in 2018.
As a viewer, it was always clear McFarland knew his football. That was proven again, even after his demotion, on the 2020 NFL Draft broadcast, as McFarland quickly broke down prospects and passed the baton to his coworkers. Maybe his skill set will shine through better in a studio setting, which Marchand reports is where ESPN plans to put him next football season in a return to the role that he had prior to being thrust onto the Monday Night stage.
The blame probably is not with McFarland for how things turned out, but more so with ESPN’s inability to nail down a broadcast team it believes in for Monday nights. Hopefully the next booth will get more opportunity to grow together as a team and build the necessary chemistry needed for broadcasting success.