Amazon really pushed for<\/a> because it would be so cool to open a stadium, and it\u2019s also another Zelig moment for me,\u201d Michaels told Richard Deitsch of Sports Business Journal. \u201cIn my career at NBC and at Disney, I did the regular season opener in Foxboro [Gillette Stadium]. It was John Madden and I and that was our first game together. We opened up the Linc in Philadelphia. We did the first game in Dallas at Jerry World. I did the first game when they refurbished Soldier Field in Chicago. I did the first regular season game at Levi\u2019s Stadium. And Chris Collinsworth and I opened up SoFi Stadium in 2020, the pandemic year. It was Dallas at the Rams with no fans.\u201d<\/p>\nThere will be plenty of fans in the building for the first true Thursday night game of 2026. (Unless hantavirus becomes a thing. Or Ebola.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know how passionate that fan base is in Buffalo and they\u2019ve been able to weather through, in a manner of speaking, all of those years at what used to be Rich Stadium,\u201d Michaels said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a tremendous buzz going on in that community. I mean, the renderings look beautiful. So that is going to be a fantastic night in Buffalo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michaels also worked the first games at the current stadiums in Atlanta and Minnesota.<\/p>\n
After finishing the last season of his three-year contract with Prime Video, Michaels and Amazon decided to keep it going for at least another year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s tough to walk away,\u201d Michaels said. \u201cBut I do know one thing: If I walk away, I\u2019m going to do it the way John Madden did it and just say, \u2018It\u2019s time.\u2019 I don\u2019t need any sort of tour or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frankly, it doesn\u2019t feel like football season has started until I hear Al\u2019s voice. And football season will never feel the same, for me and many others, once Al decides to walk away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On September 17, the legendary Al Michaels will call the first game at yet another stadium, when the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-650927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}