Last week news broke that, with Troy Aikman off the board, Amazon would turn to Kirk Herbstreit to add its upcoming NFL Thursday night games to his broadcasting portfolio. And in his Football Morning in America column for NBC, Peter King reports Monday that Amazon and Herbstreit will indeed happen.
I heard last night that Amazon—spurned by Troy Aikman, Sean McVay and John Lynch—has settled on ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit to be the analyst on its Thursday night package of NFL games starting this fall. (He’s likely to continue his current ESPN/ABC duties as well.)
It would be inaccurate to call these moves a game of musical chairs. In that game, there are more people than chairs. According to the people running the NFL TV packages, there are more No. 1 analyst chairs than keisters worthy of sitting in them. And so rather than promote someone on the Fox, CBS or NBC depth chart, Amazon first tried to lure active NFL figures before turning to Aikman and then Herbstreit.
Assuming he keeps all his ESPN duties, Herbstreit will be on television roughly 10 hours over a ~48-hour period, every weekend, for close to 20 straight weeks. In addition to the logistics of traveling to an NFL city midweek, calling a game Thursday night, traveling to the GameDay site on Friday, doing GameDay on Saturday morning, and then perhaps traveling to a different site to do ABC's Saturday Night Football game, getting off the air close to midnight if the game's in the Eastern time zone, there's also a tremendous mental weight for Herbstreit to bear.
He'll have to know both NFL teams top to bottom, both college teams' he's calling top to bottom, and stay abreast of every major storyline in college football -- week in, week out. That schedule may seem fun to you and I -- and, to be clear, it's not digging ditches, selling insurance, or doing brain surgery -- but studying enough to where you can smoothly deliver informed takes about each team that even that team's fans didn't know is a challenge that no broadcaster has ever undertaken, for good reason.
Until now, it seems.
Herbstreit has done GameDay for more than 25 seasons, and GameDay plus a Saturday Night game for more than 15, so double-dipping is old hat to him by now. And he's been open ever since calling his first NFL game in 2020 about doing more.
“I had an absolute ball calling that game,” Herbstreit said after calling Steelers-Giants to open the 2020 season. “And it made me reflect a little bit differently toward my future and what I might want to do down the road.
“Like I said, I hope to always do college football. But if NFL would be in my future, I’m a lot more open to that thought than I was maybe prior to that experience.”
Barring a late change, we're about to see more of Kirk Herbstreit -- and more of any network-level analyst -- than we've ever seen.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.