Last week’s NFL schedule release caught the attention of football fans and personnel everywhere and catalyzed even more excitement for the upcoming regular season. Amazon Prime Video is embarking on its second year as the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football, and its lead play-by-play announcer Al Michaels joined The Pat McAfee Show to share his thoughts on the property’s slate of games.
“We don’t know how the games are going to play out, but the matchups on paper look great,” Michaels said. “Look at those first three games. NBC or FOX or CBS, anybody would take those. Minnesota at Philadelphia, Giants at San Francisco, and then Detroit’s kind of the ‘it’ team this year at Green Bay. That’s a hell of a way to come out of the gate.”
McAfee mentioned to Michaels how last year’s schedule was particularly disappointing throughout the season. By contrast, this year’s schedule is indicative of an investment from the league to the property grow.
“No question,” Michaels replied. “Look at it this way, Pat…If you take a typical week in the NFL and let’s say that no team has a bye, so all 32 are going to play. So, you have 16 games on a given weekend. Three or four of them will be talked about the next day by everybody.”
The law of averages applies to Amazon Prime Video and the other NFL broadcast properties, and Michaels completely understands that all of the games throughout the season will not turn out as planned.
“We had some not very good luck last year with some of those games,” Michaels acknowledged, “but then as the season progressed and we went down the line [it got better].”
Throughout the NFL offseason, Michaels has had an avidity towards the NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs. On Thursday night, he was watching the four-overtime extravaganza – Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Carolina Hurricanes and Florida Panthers. The game-winning goal was scored in the waning seconds of the fourth overtime period, but Michaels, who lives on the West Coast, was hoping for an eighth period of hockey so he could keep watching. Of course, Michaels called the iconic “Miracle on Ice” game last year, and while McAfee and his cast would love to see him commentate for hockey, he conveyed an inability to do it at a high level.”
“I did the game of games 43 years ago. That’s it,” Michaels said. “I would end my career by trying to do a hockey game right now – I couldn’t… You stay in your lane. My lane is not hockey. My lane is watching hockey.”
