The Monday Night Football booth is set for the 2020 season. It’s Steve Levy, Louis Riddick, and Brian Griese. According to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, nothing is going to change that.
With the immediate future of college football in doubt, the NFL could put games on Saturdays to fill the void. ESPN would have the college game’s top play-by-play team of Kirk Herbstriet and Chris Fowler at its disposal. That doesn’t mean that the previously announced MNF crew would head to Saturdays to make room for the higher profile names usually in the college football booth.
Herbstet and Fowler are already in line to call the first Monday Night Football game of the season opening doubleheader. If we get Saturday NFL games this fall, ESPN and ABC would likely pursue the package. A source tells Marchand that the plan would be to have the college football duo call as many of those games as end up under Disney’s control.
Clearly, there are a lot of moving pieces here. Marchand reports that even if there is only limited college football on Saturdays in the fall, the NFL likely wouldn’t move any games to that day. It is also possible that the league allows FOX and CBS, who control the Sunday packages, to choose what games they move to Saturday each week. That would cut off negotiations before ESPN even has a chance to make its pitch. Still, the likelihood of no fans in the stands for 2020 gives the league real flexibility with its schedule. For now, it will wait and see what the college game does and ESPN will have to wait and see how the NFL responds.
I would hope ESPN would get a shot at those games to put them on ABC with Fowler and Herbie that would be the best choice for the NFL the other choices would be FOX but FOX would have MLB playoffs to move to the network. IF they moved one game a week from Sunday to Saturday then maybe it could rotate say 4 on ABC 4 CBS 4 on FOX and 4 on NBC that would give each network an opportunity to move programming around and still get a bump from the NFL.