Jason Witten was a guest on Ryen Russillo’s Ringer podcast, Dual Threat, this week. In the episode the now-former Monday Night Football analyst talked about the criticism he received from ESPN viewers and his return to the Dallas Cowboys.
“I wasn’t immune to it. It sucked going through it, at times,” Witten said of the criticism he received on a near weekly basis. “Once the narrative formed, I knew it was going to be a long-game approach.”
Russillo asked Witten about his bad habit of getting names and common sayings wrong. Witten responded with a story about the reaction he got after famously saying that Aaron Rodgers “pulled a rabbit out of his head.”
“I’d check my texts and I’d found out I was sick, or somebody died in my family. ‘Hey, praying for you’, ‘Keep your head up!’ I’m like my gosh, it wasn’t that bad!” Witten said on the podcast. “I said ‘pull a rabbit out of his head’ instead of ‘rabbit out of his hat’! You guys knew what I meant, right? I screwed up, but it wasn’t the end of the world in my opinion. I wasn’t immune to it, it sucked going through it at times.”
Still, Witten insists that the broadcast was better at the end of the season than it was at the beginning. He told Russillo that he, Joe Tessitore, and Booger McFarland had “had two or three really good games” once ESPN did away with the Booger Mobile and McFarland moved into the booth.
As for his return to the Dallas Cowboys, Witten insists that it wasn’t motivated by any negative experience with broadcasting. “I didn’t make this decision [to return to the Cowboys] off of the noise and the criticism…it was really just, ‘I want to play.’ The scoreboard matters, and I want to be a part of that.”
You can hear the full episode below.
