Would Troy Aikman actually walk away from ESPN?

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Something is off when the analyst half of the longest-running broadcast marriage in NFL history is the one raising doubts about his own future, not the network that employs him.

That’s where Troy Aikman left things this week. Just days after Joe Buck reportedly agreed to a six-year extension worth more than $100 million that locks him in through ESPN’s next two Super Bowls, Aikman went on Richard Deitsch’s podcast and made it clear his own deal is nowhere near that.

“I thought something would be done prior to the start of this season,” Aikman said. “I’ve never gone into the last year of a contract ever since I signed with the Dallas Cowboys. And so I thought that it would be done. It’s not.”

He added that when, or if, it gets resolved is anyone’s guess, and that he isn’t putting much energy into it.

Fox’s Greg Olsen and Amazon’s Kirk Herbstreit are both heading into the final seasons of their own contracts, alongside Aikman, and Olsen’s deal even includes a clause letting him leave for a top job if one opens up, which he’s made no secret of wanting. Add in the uncertainty around Tony Romo’s status at CBS following his OWI arrest, and the expectation that Amazon moves on from both Herbstreit and 81-year-old Al Michaels this offseason, and you’ve got nearly every top analyst chair in football either open or about to be.

Most people would consider it unthinkable for Aikman to call games with anyone other than Buck, which theoretically should have made an extension close to automatic. Instead, Buck signed first, and now Aikman is the only piece of the sport’s marquee broadcast pairing still unaccounted for.

As our staff kicked around over the weekend, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the ESPN analyst. If anything, it’s arguably the opposite. Aikman is already one of the highest-paid analysts in the sport at an $18.5 million salary, and he’s doing it while reasserting his claim as arguably the best in the business since joining ESPN alongside Buck four years ago. A soon-to-be free agent at that level, sitting across the table from a network that needed two years and multiple teardowns just to make its own booth watchable again, is not exactly negotiating from weakness.

ESPN has lived through this exact debacle before. From 2018 to 2020, Monday Night Football’s booth was, by near-universal consensus, the most dysfunctional in football.

Jason Witten went from playing tight end for the Cowboys to calling MNF with virtually no broadcasting experience, and the learning curve was painfully obvious. His analysis was often clunky and predictable, and was marred by mangled syntax, threadbare clichés, and a Pro Bowl MVP trophy he literally shattered on live television. Booger McFarland called games from a motorized cart on the sideline that fans instantly christened the Booger Mobile, and instead of the novelty ESPN envisioned, it curdled into a running punchline.

An Awful Announcing poll that fall ranked MNF dead last among every NFL booth, and it wasn’t particularly close. ESPN kept the trio intact for a second full season anyway before finally blowing it up, and it took several more rounds of teardowns after that before Awful Announcing could publish a piece whose entire thesis was that the booth had finally clawed its way to fine.

That history is exactly why ESPN can’t afford to gamble here. The network spent four years and roughly nine figures combined finding a pairing that finally worked, and conventional wisdom says that the Worldwide Leader isn’t about to test whether it can get lucky twice.

Would Aikman really leave, though? Probably not, but it’s not exactly theoretical, either. He’s left a broadcast partner before without knowing whether it would work out. Four years ago, Aikman bolted Fox for ESPN first, with Buck still owing Fox a year on his own deal and no guarantee the network would let him go. Fox, notably, didn’t just fold when Aikman left — it dangled Greg Olsen and, more audaciously, Tom Brady in front of Buck to try to keep him, a pitch Buck turned down for “the known quantity” of following Aikman.

The point isn’t that Aikman is plotting a repeat. It’s that the person most likely to assume Aikman’s contract situation resolves itself has, in fact, already shown he’s willing to make the harder call when he thinks it’s the right one.

Aikman isn’t playing this coy publicly. He told Deitsch that Buck’s extension was “no question” a factor in his own decision, and that he’d “100%” like to keep working with Buck going forward — he just won’t say the decision is entirely his to make.

For now, the smart bet is still that Aikman re-ups with ESPN and keeps calling games with Buck, because the alternative — starting over with a new partner in his late 50s, or walking away from the top seat in the sport altogether — is a lot to give up for leverage. But a “smart bet” isn’t the same as a “sure thing,” and ESPN, of all networks, knows exactly what it costs when that assumption proves wrong.

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