How’s this for a crazy sports broadcasting stat? When Al Michaels calls Amazon Prime Video’s opening regular season game on Sept. 17 -- the Lions at Bills at Buffalo’s new Highmark Stadium -- it will be the 10th time in the broadcaster’s storied career that he is on the mic for an inaugural regular season game in a new NFL stadium.
“This was a game Amazon really pushed for because it would be so cool to open a stadium, and it’s also another Zelig moment for me,” Michaels said this week during his appearance on the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch. “In 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’s Stadium. And Chris Collinsworth and I opened up SoFi Stadium in 2020, the pandemic year. It was Dallas at the Rams with no fans.
“We know how passionate that fan base is in Buffalo and they’ve been able to weather through, in a manner of speaking, all of those years at what used to be Rich Stadium,” Michaels continued. “There’s 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.”
(Via ace NBC Sports communication executive Dan Masonson: Michaels was also on the mic for the regular season openings of new stadiums in Indianapolis, Atlanta and Minneapolis.)
As first reported by SBJ, Michaels will call games once again for Prime Video for the 2026 NFL season. The 81-year-old has been the lead game-caller for the streamer’s “Thursday Night Football” package since 2022 and has called prime-time NFL football for the past 40 seasons. Both parties now look at the arrangement as a year-by-year deal.
“Amazon has been phenomenal,” Michaels said. “My original deal was three years and then after the third year I felt that I wanted to go on. I said, ‘Look guys, I appreciate this and I’m getting closer to the end than the beginning obviously. If you want to move, I’ll understand it.’ They said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like to do it.’ So that’s how we came to an agreement. It’s just a wonderful group from the top on down. Andy Jassy, the CEO of the company, is a gigantic sports fan. I’m to the point now where I can’t think too far ahead. I still love what I do.
“We’re talking about this right now and I just finished a very long piece on ESPN.com about Steve Kerr. It’s like a book. Steve is considerably younger than I am, but I’m thinking the same things that he’s thinking about how this is such a part of your life and part of your fabric and fiber. I don’t know Steve very well, but I find him to be one of the great people in sports these days. I really was able to lock into a lot of the things he thought about. It’s tough to walk away. But I do know one thing: If I walk away, I’m going to do it the way John Madden did it and just say it’s time. I don’t need any sort of tour or whatever.”
See here for the full interview with Michaels and a second segment featuring SBJ’s Austin Karp.