{"id":857763,"date":"2026-09-23T12:42:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T12:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857763\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T12:42:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T12:42:24","slug":"would-troy-aikman-actually-walk-away-from-espn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857763\/","title":{"rendered":"Would Troy Aikman actually walk away from ESPN?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This originally appeared in Tuesday morning\u2019s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing\u2019s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Troy Aikman left things this week. Just days after Joe Buck reportedly agreed to a six-year extension worth more than $100 million<\/a> that locks him in through ESPN\u2019s next two Super Bowls, Aikman went on Richard Deitsch\u2019s podcast<\/a> and made it clear his own deal is nowhere near that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought something would be done prior to the start of this season,\u201d Aikman said. \u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that when, or if, it gets resolved is anyone\u2019s guess, and that he isn\u2019t putting much energy into it.<\/p>\n

Fox\u2019s Greg Olsen<\/a> and Amazon\u2019s Kirk Herbstreit<\/a> are both heading into the final seasons of their own contracts, alongside Aikman,<\/a> and Olsen\u2019s deal even includes a clause letting him leave for a top job if one opens up, which he\u2019s made no secret of wanting. Add in the uncertainty around Tony Romo\u2019s status at CBS<\/a> following his OWI arrest, and the expectation<\/a> that Amazon moves on from both Herbstreit and 81-year-old Al Michaels this offseason, and you\u2019ve got nearly every top analyst chair in football either open or about to be.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s marquee broadcast pairing still unaccounted for.<\/p>\n

As our staff kicked around over the weekend, that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing for the ESPN analyst. If anything, it\u2019s arguably the opposite. Aikman is already one of the highest-paid analysts in the sport at an $18.5 million salary, and he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

ESPN has lived through this exact debacle before. From 2018 to 2020, Monday Night Football\u2019s booth was, by near-universal consensus, the most dysfunctional in football.<\/p>\n

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 clich\u00e9s, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An Awful Announcing poll that fall ranked\u00a0MNF dead last among every NFL booth, and it wasn\u2019t 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<\/a> whose entire thesis was that the booth had finally clawed its way to fine.<\/p>\n

That history is exactly why ESPN can\u2019t 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\u2019t about to test whether it can get lucky twice.<\/p>\n

Would Aikman really leave, though? Probably not, but it\u2019s not exactly theoretical, either. He\u2019s left a broadcast partner before without knowing whether it would work ou<\/a>t. 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\u2019t just fold when Aikman left \u2014 it dangled Greg Olsen and, more audaciously, Tom Brady in front of Buck to try to keep him<\/a>, a pitch Buck turned down for \u201cthe known quantity\u201d of following Aikman.<\/p>\n

The point isn\u2019t that Aikman is plotting a repeat. It\u2019s that the person most likely to assume Aikman\u2019s contract situation resolves itself has, in fact, already shown he\u2019s willing to make the harder call when he thinks it\u2019s the right one.<\/p>\n

Aikman isn\u2019t playing this coy publicly. He told Deitsch that Buck\u2019s extension was \u201cno question\u201d a factor in his own decision, and that he\u2019d \u201c100%\u201d like to keep working with Buck going forward \u2014 he just won\u2019t say the decision is entirely his to make.<\/p>\n

For now, the smart bet is still that Aikman re-ups with ESPN and keeps calling games with Buck, because the alternative \u2014 starting over with a new partner in his late 50s, or walking away from the top seat in the sport altogether \u2014 is a lot to give up for leverage. But a \u201csmart bet\u201d isn\u2019t the same as a \u201csure thing,\u201d and ESPN, of all networks, knows exactly what it costs when that assumption proves wrong.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to Awful Announcing\u2019s \u201cThe A Block\u201d newsletter here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This originally appeared in Tuesday morning\u2019s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing\u2019s daily newsletter with the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[137237,399,95718,106615,176805,125597,50687,398,396,397,30572,99,82871],"class_list":["post-857763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-booger-mcfarland","tag-football","tag-greg-olsen","tag-jason-witten","tag-joe-buck","tag-kirk-herbstreit","tag-monday-night-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-nfl-on-espn","tag-sports","tag-troy-aikman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857763","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=857763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}