The noise around Al Michaels right now mostly concerns the games he’ll be missing, following the New York Post’s report last month that NBC has decided not to include Michaels in its NFL playoff coverage this year. Fair enough: The network’s decision is a watermark of sorts, separating Michaels from post-season work in a league in which he has called a record-tying 11 Super Bowls.
It’s hard to quietly separate. Michaels clearly wanted to continue doing playoff work, and his agreement with Amazon as the voice of its Thursday Night Football production allows him to do so for NBC in an emeritus status. He appeared to be caught off-guard by NBC’s decision to move on from him, at one point telling the Post’s Andrew Marchand, “It’s in my deal. Where are you hearing that from? That’s part of my deal. Are you hearing something that I’m not hearing?”
So, you know – messy. The NBC/Michaels parting in 2022 wasn’t rosy. It was necessary because the network had been promising SNF to Mike Tirico for years, and for years Michaels had continued to fill the role and want the job. ‘Emeritus’ became a sort of escape hatch (NBC has applied the title to Tom Brokaw and Bob Costas, for example), and Amazon happily moved in to scoop up Michaels for its new NFL venture.
But what gets lost in all of this is that Al Michaels, at 79, is still in the thick of things. He still matters enough, to enough people, that even a relatively minor decision like NBC choosing someone else to cover a first-round NFL playoff game constitutes news.
Considering everything, that’s almost – almost – a compliment.
You can’t blame Michaels if he feels otherwise, although he has taken the high road on the topic publicly. Michaels hasn’t said much. After calling the final TNF game of the season with partner Kirk Herbstreit, he told USA Today that he will absolutely be back for a third season with Amazon. Michaels didn’t directly comment on the NBC stuff.
“I feel good,” the broadcaster said. “I feel healthy and fine. I’ve told Amazon that I’d do three years and next year will be three, and I’m definitely doing it. We’ll see after that.”
It’s impossible to talk about the NBC decision without noting how forcefully Michaels and Tony Dungy were criticized last year for their low-energy call of the Jaguars’ stunning comeback from 27 points down to beat the Chargers 31-30 in the first round. Again, totally fair – the pair laid an egg. Jacksonville’s victory appeared almost to sneak up on them. Bad day at the office.
But there wasn’t much residue from that performance to be heard on Amazon’s broadcasts this season. The Michaels-Herbstreit pairing will produce fans and haters in roughly equal measure, but Michaels calling an NFL game still feels like a routinely normal thing – and given how many lower-quality games the Thursday short-rest schedule tends to produce, Michaels’ cadences didn’t strike me as out of balance very often. Some of those games didn’t merit much shouting, put it that way.
Is Michaels the same broadcaster he was at 57, Mike Tirico’s age now? Of course not. For that matter, NBC’s decision to hand the reins to Tirico two seasons ago wasn’t really controversial. It was simply that Al Michaels casts such a shadow over NFL broadcasting by the depth and breadth of his career with the league, a relationship that goes back decades and ventures into Pat Summerall territory for longevity and quality of work, that the switch was never going to be seamless.
As for the 2024 playoffs, NBC probably got it right again. The network has three NFL playoff games this month, two wild cards and a divisional game, and Tirico and Cris Collinsworth will handle two of them, as they should. With the third, the network wants to try its No. 1 college broadcast team, including fast-rising Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge, with Kathryn Tappen on the sideline.
Somebody had to be moved in order to make that happen, and that’s business. And look, we’re talking about one early-round playoff game. This isn’t the balance of Al Michaels’ career. It just feels different because the person in question has broadcasting credentials that are virtually unmatched in the NFL’s long history.
As for next season, “I still love this job,” Michaels told USA Today. “I still get a charge out of going into a stadium and watching the best in the world do what they do. I’m still really happy, so that’s the big thing.”
Almost no one in sports gets to write the ending they want. Far more athletes are told that their road has run out than actually get to choose their own exit. Based on his few public comments so far, Al Michaels will do what he can to make that exit as graceful as possible – and the long view says that’s exactly how it should go.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
