Joe Buck, Troy Aikman excited for new ESPN Monday Night Football gig
Joe Buck and Troy Aikman attend the 2017 FOX Upfront at Wollman Rink in Central Park on May 15, 2017. Credit: TNS/Michael Loccisano
Jack Buck died 20 years ago, after a career that included a long run calling “Monday Night Football” on radio with Hank Stram.
On Monday, his son Joe visited ESPN’s Connecticut campus for the first time, as the new TV voice of “Monday Night Football,” part of a frenzied and spectacularly lucrative offseason of football announcing musical chairs.
He wondered what his father would have thought of it all.
“I think he'd be stunned if he walked out of the grave right now and said, ‘Wow, that's what's going on in this business?’” Buck said on a video call with reporters from Bristol.
What has gone on is a reshuffling that has affected every national media outlet’s top NFL booth other than CBS’, including Buck and Aikman leaving Fox after two decades together there.
Elsewhere, it’s now Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth at NBC, Kevin Burkhardt and (eventually) Tom Brady at Fox and Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit at Amazon.
“I think it gets back to kind of a supply and demand and having a known quantity and knowing how much I wanted to go work with Troy and continue that relationship,” Buck said of ESPN’s move.
“They pretty much know what they're going to get when opening day rolls around in Seattle. So it's been kind of crazy. It's been exciting on this end of the business.”
The boldest move came when Fox signed Brady as its No. 1 analyst – as soon as he is done playing football. Buck and Aikman expect Brady to excel.
“Would anybody ever bet against the guy being great at anything?” Buck said. “He's kind of cornered the market in that . . . I think it'll be a steep learning curve, and I'm sure he'll be fantastic.”
Said Aikman, “Tom has won at everything he's done in life, and there's no reason to think that he won't win at this as well.”
Aikman said he did not anticipate leaving Fox and was discussing splitting his time between Fox and Prime Video’s Thursday night package.
But in the end, ESPN signed him away as a free agent, then Buck started speaking to Fox about getting out of the final year of his contract to rejoin Aikman.
He recalled a tipping point being a conversation with former Fox Sports president David Hill in which Hill encouraged him to take a chance by saying, “You will be nervous before your first game, and when was the last time you were really nervous before your first game?”
The nervousness started early on Monday. Buck said being in the cafeteria at ESPN made him feel like the new kid in school. “You wonder if anybody is going to sit next to you, because you don't know anybody,” he said.
Buck and Aikman represent an A-list play timed in part for a new contract with the NFL that will bring Super Bowls to ABC/ESPN in 2027 and ’31.
Like everyone who gets the “Monday Night Football” gig, Buck and Aikman waxed nostalgic about watching those games growing up — although in Buck’s case that often meant doing so in person on work trips with his father.
“I would go with him to these different stadiums and sit in the radio booth a couple of steps away from the ‘Monday Night Football’ booth, and I knew as a little kid, something special was going on two doors down,” he said.
Buck and Aikman have deep roots at Fox. Aikman said the most difficult call he had to make about leaving was to reporter Erin Andrews, whom he said is “like a sister to both of us.”
Buck said one bonus of him leaving Fox was “getting out of the way” of younger announcers such as his successors on football and baseball, Burkhardt and Joe Davis.
Buck knew about Burkhardt’s coming promotion before Burkhardt did, and had to resist telling him.
“I’m proud of the body of work [at Fox],” Buck said. “Now let's go somewhere else and start a new chapter and let's see somebody else step into those roles at my old place. I'll be their biggest fans.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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