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Longtime NFL play-by-play announcer Al Michaels will join tech giant Amazon to lead the company’s Thursday Night Football broadcast booth. Michaels will be paired with ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit in the TNF booth. Amazon announced the new booth on Wednesday.
Notably, Amazon also announced that it had hired longtime NBC Sunday Night Football executive producer Fred Gaudelli to lead its Thursday games. Gaudelli, a 24-time Emmy winner, will join Amazon “as part of a collaboration with NBC Sports.” He will “continue on NBC Sports’ executive team and will serve as a key contributor to NBC Sunday Night Football’s editorial and production efforts,” while also leading Amazon’s live football coverage.
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Herbstreit will also continue to work with ESPN on its college football programming.
Michaels had been the lead announcer for NBC’s Sunday Night Football since 2006, and before that spent two decades as the play-by-play voice of ABC’s Monday Night Football. Michaels called his last game for NBC at Super Bowl LVI earlier this year.
“Over the last 36 seasons, I’ve been at the mic describing some of the most magical moments and games in NFL history and am looking forward to many more,” said Michaels in a statement. “This is the new frontier in sports television and to be a part of the launch at this point in my career is both exciting and stimulating. The NFL is the king of unscripted television and I’m looking forward to joining Kirk to bring fans more dramatic episodes on Thursday nights this fall.”
Amazon secured the exclusive rights to TNF beginning this year (in previous years it ran a simulcast of the Fox broadcast and offered some alternate announcer audio feeds) and has wanted to make a splashy foray into being the exclusive national home of a primetime NFL game. The company hired a veteran of the NFL Network to oversee coverage of TNF.
“Al and Kirk bring unparalleled experience to our historic new Thursday Night Football game telecasts, as we kick off our groundbreaking new agreement with the NFL,” said Marie Donoghue, vp of global sports video for Amazon. “Having these two legends in the booth, with the best game producer in the business, Fred Gaudelli, will help make Thursday night the most exciting football night of the week.”
Michaels to Amazon comes amid a great reshuffling among NFL broadcast booths. Earlier this month ESPN poached Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox Sports to have them lead its Monday Night Football booth. NBC, meanwhile, replaced Michaels with Mike Tirico. Now all eyes are on Fox, which needs to replace Buck and Aikman.
ESPN actually “traded” Fox a college football game between Penn State and Purdue to get the network to release Buck from his contract a year early. As it happens, when Michaels left Disney for NBC in 2006, the companies made a similar trade, with Disney letting Michaels out of his deal early in exchange for NBC handing over the rights to Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character that Walt Disney created for Universal Pictures in 1927.
The deal also caps off a big month for Amazon, which also closed its acquisition of MGM, making it a major player in both entertainment and live sports.
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