In a surprise move, NBC has decided against bringing back Al Michaels for their playoff coverage in January.
Michaels was the main play-by-play voice at NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” program from 2006 to 2021. Mike Tirico replaced Michaels in that spot beginning last year, and Michaels secured a lucrative contract with Amazon Prime Video to call their “Thursday Night Football” games.
Last year, NBC allowed Michaels to come back and call the Jacksonville Jaguars-Los Angeles Chargers Wild Card Round playoff game. Earlier this week, Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported that Michaels was taken off NBC’s postseason coverage, much to the 79-year-old’s surprise.
There is speculation going around that Michaels was taken off the NBC broadcasts in favor of Noah Eagle (the son of CBS Sports’ Ian Eagle) and Todd Blackledge because of comments he made about Taylor Swift back in October.
Swift is in a relationship with Kansas City Chiefs superstar tight end Travis Kelce. Their relationship has drawn plenty of NFL media coverage, but Michaels didn’t seem so keen on having to talk about it on a TNF broadcast back in October.
Here are the comments Michaels made about Swift during an interview with Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated:
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“What we’re gonna do tonight, everything in moderation. Our crew talked about it this morning. You can’t make a sideshow the show. The vast majority of the audience are tuning in to watch a football game. There are people, I don’t know how many, it could be a sizable number, but it’s certainly not a majority, that if you trained the camera on her all night long, they’d be satisfied with that. This is not what we’re doing to do.
“There might be an appropriate shot or a couple. I don’t know what the number is going to be…But for the most part, just in moderation. The game is still the important element here, by far. That’s our thought. After that, you sort of make it, one of my favorite words, farcical.”
“Moderation. That’s our word. Everything in moderation. What do you do at a certain point? ‘There she is.’ O.K. Got it.”
Michaels told Marchand that the news surprised him, since he wasn’t informed by the network. Marchand’s report noted that tension had long existed between Michaels and NBC before his departure from the network in 2022.
