Now that Jason Kelce has made his retirement from the NFL official, it is time to speculate on what might happen next. Kelce has reportedly already met with ESPN, FOX Sports, Amazon Prime Video and CBS Sports about joining their NFL coverage, however, Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti talked this morning on WFAN about which role suits Kelce best.
“Every single network and streaming service is going to be vying for his services if he wants to be a broadcaster, which I’m assuming he is going to want to do in his retirement,” said Giannotti. “That podcast that him and Travis have, very popular, you can tell he’s a good talker, he’s a good speaker, he is someone where it should come natural to him being on TV. But, what would his role be? I don’t see him as a color analyst because he seems a little rougher around the edges to be able to do that.”
“He would have to be like a studio analyst,” Boomer said. “But, the thing about it is he has made a ton of money in his life, and he has little kids, is he going to want to commit to that type of role every single weekend?”
Esiason mentioned Tom Brady took a year off and that JJ Watt, who lives in Phoenix, only worked 6 weeks for CBS on NFL Today in New York because he just had a baby and didn’t want to travel every week. Boomer speculated guys like Kelce and others that follow may look for schedules similar to what Watt’s was, not just because of travel or time commitment, but because they don’t need the money. “The guys coming out now made a ton of money,” he said.
Giannotti pointed to the large deals given to Tom Brady and Tony Romo, but Esiason thinks those contracts had a lot to do with timing of different pieces moving around, such as Joe Buck and Troy Aikman going to ESPN.
Giannotti said, “You still get a lot of money if you are one of the top guys and I can imagine that somebody is going to make it worthwhile for someone like Jason Kelce…I can’t imagine a guy like that, who loves the game like he does, loves a microphone, is going to able to stay away from a job in this industry where somebody is going to pay him multiple millions of dollars to talk about the game.”
While Giannotti mentioned earlier he didn’t think Kelce would make a great color analyst, he did come back later with an interesting question and comparison. “Could Jason Kelce develop in to that John Madden-ish of now time, an intense, sort of funny, ‘BOOM!,’ look at that offensive lineman type of guy?”
