“Thursday Night Football” has never been known as the best primetime window as most teams that played on Sunday have to gear up to play again days later and it usually ends up being a terrible game for all players as well as fans watching at home.
In his first year with Amazon, Al Michaels, longtime voice of “Sunday Night Football,” often became a vocal critic of the performance by the two teams, He never hesitated to call out bad football.
Michaels told The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch that the staff at Amazon showed “nothing but support” as he often became known for calling out the quality of the games.
“A lot of people said, ‘Al’s bored, Al’s pissed off that he’s doing this.’ Not the case,” Michaels said on Richard Dietsch’s Sports Media Podcast this week. “Monday nights, Sunday night, I did things like this. Maybe not to that degree, but I try to echo the feelings of what the fan feels because I’m a fan.”
Michaels added that he ddi not want to sell fans a used car by what they were watching at home.
“From the Amazon people, nothing but support,” said Michaels. “I think they understood what this was. We’re making the most of it. I mean, you just can’t oversell something. Do you want me to sell you a 20-year-old Mazda? That’s what you’re asking me to do. I can’t sell you a used car. … I’ve kind of gone down that road a little bit in games that have been bad in the past. But this game was horrifically bad. What were you supposed to do at that point? And away I went.”
Ouch.
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The worst game on TNF had to be the Colts-Broncos contest that saw Indy ultimately prevailing in overtime 12-9. There were 681 total yards in the game. It was truly a battle of field goals.
During that contest, Michaels told analyst Kirk Herbstreit that “sometimes, a game can be, at least to this point, so bad it’s almost good. You know what I’m saying?”
Herbstreit responded simply, “No,” adding, “I’m not feeling that just yet over here.”
Michaels will be on the call of the Jaguars-Chargers wild-card game on Saturday for NBC as he returns to the booth to call the primetime contest alongside Tony Dungy.
We can only hope and pray that next year’s slate of games on Thursday Night Football will be much better.
