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SI Media Mailbag: ‘Monday Night Football’ Broadcast Crew Update

In Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Mailbag, he answers questions about the ‘Monday Night Football’ backup booth, Pat McAfee, Terry Bradshaw, Sunday Ticket and much more.

Jimmy Traina

Welcome to the 17th installment of a weekly mailbag that I will be writing about the world of sports media (and anything else you want to chime in on). Please email me any questions you have to Jimmy.Traina@si.com or send them via Twitter.

We start the mailbag off with a little NFL broadcaster news.

As you know, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are ESPN’s regular Monday Night Football broadcasters.

However, ESPN/ABC needs a second crew to call five games in the 2023 season. 

ESPN/ABC will have doubleheaders in Weeks 2, 3, 14 and 18. In addition, the alternative crew will call the Week 4 Falcons-Jaguars London game at 9:30 a.m. ET, which will be aired exclusively on ESPN+.

The New York Post’s Andrew Marchand reported in May that Chris Fowler would be replacing Steve Levy as the play-by-play caller for the No. 2 booth, and ESPN is expected to formally announce that in August..

ESPN did confirm to Sports Illustrated that Dan Orlovsky and Louis Riddick, who worked with Levy, will again be the analysts for ESPN/ABC’s second booth.

Obviously, Fowler couldn’t work with his regular partner, Kirk Herbstreit, who he has called NFL games with in the past, now that Herbstreit works the Thursday night game on Amazon Prime.

So for five games this season, you'll get Fowler, Orlovsky and Riddick calling the action on ABC/ESPN.

This is such a fascinating question to me because I don’t find Pat McAfee that polarizing. He’s overwhelmingly popular, and I think the people who don’t like him are probably old-school folks who get offended if someone says the f-word. 

When I think “polarizing,” I think of someone who is loved and hated. I don’t consider McAfee hated. There are plenty of awful media people out there who are hated, but I’m not going to mention them, because that’s exactly what they want.

McAfee has a very high-energy personality, and that may not be some people’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t lead to being hated. Being an a-hole leads to people hating you. I don't think anyone would say McAfee is an a-hole.

If you are someone who is on the fence about McAfee, I recommend you listen to his recent appearance on SI Media With Jimmy Traina. I think it would be nearly impossible to listen to him on the pod and come away not liking him.

I’m pretty sure you’re screwed. My guess is that the NFL never considered that some people might be shut out of Sunday Ticket due to living in areas with spotty internet, because the NFL is going to make $2.5 billion annually from the YouTube deal and that was the only thing the league considered.

As I’ve said many times over the years, I have a strong dislike of three-person booths. There’s just no need for it, and, more times than not, it comes off as clumsy and awkward, especially when they all try to crack each other up. In the case of CBS, the three-man booths are for the lower-level games. CBS’s top three crews are Jim Nantz–Tony Romo, Ian Eagle–Charles Davis and Kevin Harlan–Trent Green. So the best CBS games each week will still be called by a two-man booth.

Stop it! There will be no Terry Bradshaw slander on my watch. Sure, Terry may not be as sharp as he once was, and he’s in that “goofy old guy” stage of his career, and he probably shouldn't be doing the trophy ceremonies anymore for Fox, but he’s a national treasure who should go out on his own terms. 

If they come up with good money, yes. If they don’t come up with good money, then no. No deal for Monday Night Countdown has been made yet between ESPN and Scott Van Pelt, so we’ll see what happens.

If I could pick people who work at other networks, the play-by-play choice is easy: Joe Buck. He was the voice of Major League Baseball for a long time, and he is an excellent baseball broadcaster. The analyst would be TBS’s Ron Darling, who I think is the best in the business today.

This question has been asked for years and years and years. What you need to understand is that Major League Baseball doesn’t care about its fans. No league cares about its fans. We are all suckers and we will always watch, and they know this. So there’s no reason for them to fix ridiculous things like the blackout rule.

I would have no way of knowing this, but it’s completely bonkers to me that so many athletes got in on the Bitcoin craze. It was bonkers to me then and now.

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This was very well done by WWE broadcaster Corey Graves on this week’s episode of Monday Night Raw.

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Jimmy Traina
JIMMY TRAINA

Jimmy Traina is a staff writer and podcast host for Sports Illustrated. A 20-year veteran in the industry, he’s been covering the sports media landscape for seven years and writes a daily column, Traina Thoughts. Traina has hosted the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast since 2018, a show known for interviews with some of the most important and powerful people in sports media. He also was the creator and writer of SI’s Hot Clicks feature from 2007 to '13.

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