The NFL is the most popular show on television – by a wide margin – and that will not change in 2022. But the cast of characters, and the way in which people will watch them, underwent seismic changes in the offseason, according to Neil Best at Newsday.
Much of the attention focused on a game of announcer musical chairs that made some play-by-play men and analysts extremely wealthy and affected every network’s No. 1 booth other than CBS’.
But the most fundamental change is the one on Thursday nights, where Amazon Prime Video will become the first streaming service to carry an exclusive national package of games.
As has always been the case for games shown on cable outlets, the NFL will require that these be available on a local broadcast channel in the markets of the two teams involved. But other than that, it’s streaming or nothing.
(Prime Video did strike a deal with DirecTV to show games in bars, restaurants and other public venues.)
On one hand, Amazon will be able to offer viewers more than a traditional TV outlet with alternate feeds, highlights on demand, stats and the like. But its core strategy with the main telecast is not to shock or upset fans with a radical new approach.
Hence the hiring of Al Michaels, a 77-year-old pillar of NFL play-by-play men, longtime ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit and executive producer Fred Gaudelli, a veteran of both “Monday Night Football” and “Sunday Night Football.”
Said Michaels, “I find it to be exciting in the sense that all of my friends and my kids and my grandkids all think this is about the coolest thing in the world.
“So even though it's a different platform, the one thing I think you can count on is that we are not going to reinvent the wheel. We're going to do the games. People are going to tune in to watch the games, and we're not going to do anything that's crazy.”
Michaels still will call some games for NBC, but when his contract there expired he ceded his spot in the Sunday night booth to Mike Tirico, who will work with analyst Cris Collinsworth.
Fox, meanwhile, will go with Kevin Burkhardt, a former SNY Mets reporter, and analyst Greg Olsen, who is keeping that seat warm until Tom Brady retires (again). They will call this season’s Super Bowl for Fox.
Fox’s booth opened up when its longtime lead announcing team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman moved to ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” Aikman when his contract was up and Buck when Fox let him out of his a year early.
Only CBS’ No. 1 team of Jim Nantz and Tony Romo – whose 2020 contract to re-sign with CBS started the recent wave of mega-deals for announcers – remains intact among the major networks’ lead teams.
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