Very few people outside of Bristol are as plugged in behind the scenes of ESPN as Jim Miller, author of the network retrospective Those Guys Have All the Fun. On a recent edition of the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast, he told Jimmy Traina that he thinks ESPN and FOX are discussing how to make it work for Joe Buck to join Troy Aikman in the Monday Night Football booth.
He recalled Disney and NBC negotiating over Oswald the Lucky Rabbit more than a decade ago when Al Michales wanted to follow John Madden to Sunday Night Football on NBC. There are no cartoon characters involved in the current negotiations according to Miller. He described it as “some real horse trading”.
“I mean, look, does Fox want to keep Joe if Joe’s going to be unhappy? No. But do they want to be able to monetize this in myriad ways in order to really get some flesh out of ESPN? Absolutely,” Jim Miller said. “And what might that mean? You know, if I’m Fox, I might ask for two or three Big Ten games. You can be as outrageous and greedy and audacious as you can in this situation because at the end of the day, look, it’s ‘Joe does a great job, and we don’t want to get rid of him. If you guys want to have both of those guys together, then you’re going to have to pay.’”
Miller emphasized that he does not know for certain that the two networks are in negotiations. He said both sides would be foolish not to be. When Traina asked if Joe Buck and Troy Aikman would be ESPN’s Monday Night Football crew in 2023, Miller said “I can’t imagine it not being.”
It would be interesting if it is something like Big Ten games involved in negotiations. It would be a very short-term payoff for FOX, as the conference’s media rights are set to hit the open market very soon and are expected to fetch as much as $1 billion per year.
