That tracks with what we’ve covered here before. Back in January, Marchand assessed Kelce as someone who would only accept a No. 1 job and pegged his range anywhere from $10 to $20 million. The $15 million studio floor is essentially the low end of that range, and it’s for the role Kelce might not even want.
Kelce wants the booth. He said so last July on Bussin’ With the Boys — unprompted and unambiguously — that he grew up mimicking the guys who called games, that he always imagined what it would feel like actually to be one of them. He saw Tom Brady’s $375 million Fox deal and, by his own admission, “everyone saw it.” If he’s going to do this, he wants to call games, not react to them from a set somewhere.
The one thing giving him pause isn’t the workload or the possibility of ending up on sites like Awful Announcing. It’s reading. His SNL hosting stint — which required table reads — was, in his words, “a f*cked situation” for a guy who, by his own description, “can’t really read that well.” Player names, he admitted, would be where he’d “get f*cking ruined” in a live broadcast setting. Butchering a name or two has never stopped anyone from having a long career in this industry, just ask Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo.