Troy Aikman and Joe Buck prior to the Monday Night Football NFC Wild Card Playoff game.
Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images
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The NFL has no concerns about the state of ESPN’s Monday Night Football booth, according to league chief media officer Hans Schroeder, who addressed the reported tension between Joe Buck and Troy Aikman on Wednesday, one week after the longtime partners were said to have argued over their respective contract situations before a broadcast.
Asked Wednesday whether the league was worried about their relationship, Schroeder pointed to ESPN’s coverage of the San Francisco 49ers’ win over the Washington Commanders on Monday night.
“No concern. I don’t know if you watched the game on Monday night,” Schroeder said via Front Office Sport’s Mark Maske. “It was an incredible game, right? It was an incredible game and incredible coverage by Joe and Troy, just like they always do.”
FOS’s Ryan Glasspiegel reported last week that Buck and Aikman quibbled ahead of ESPN’s Oct. 12 Rams-Bills broadcast at SoFi Stadium, which will also host Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14, after Buck raised the subject of his new contract with Aikman, who is in the final year of his deal and has not received a formal offer from the network. ESPN signed Buck to a six-year, $108 million extension in September, per The Athletic, keeping him on Monday Night Football through the network’s second Super Bowl in 2031, while Aikman, whose current deal reportedly pays him $18 million annually, told Richard Deitsch in the ensuing days that he had expected his own contract to be resolved before the start of the season and noted that he had never gone into the final year of a contract since signing with the Dallas Cowboys.
Aikman responded to the FOS report the following morning on KTCK The Ticket in Dallas, where he made no attempt to deny the argument took place. Hours later, he doubled down in a conversation with Jimmy Traina, explaining from his vantage point that ESPN appeared to be moving on.
“It just seems to be where they’re going — that they’re gonna go in a different direction because there’s been no talks, no contract negotiations,” Aikman said. “We’re in a Super Bowl year. The Super Bowl is Feb. 14. My contract ends in March. It just doesn’t seem logical that if they were gonna keep me, something wouldn’t be in place before that.”
If anything boiled over on Monday night, it was Aikman’s disdain for analytics, and while the two weren’t as chummy as usual, and one could pick apart the moments where Aikman wasn’t laughing along or the pair weren’t trading their customary banter, nothing about the broadcast itself suggested the partnership had fractured beyond what either man could put aside for three hours.
The duo moved to ESPN ahead of the 2022 season after Aikman signed with the network first and Buck received permission from Fox to leave a year before his contract expired. Aikman has said he came to ESPN in large part to help mend the network’s relationship with the NFL, which has since expanded to include ESPN’s first Super Bowl broadcast, and Buck said last month that he hoped Aikman would remain at ESPN, citing his own decision to leave Fox early to rejoin him, after previously comparing their partnership to a marriage during an appearance with Bob Ley at the Seton Hall Center for Sports Media.
“I think the fans are deserving of first-class game production, which Joe and Troy have, I think, going back to ’02 or something was their first year, a history of doing that as well as anyone. And I think you’ll continue to see them do that as well as anyone. I thought it was awesome Monday night. And so we’re incredibly excited about the year… and the Super Bowl and their coverage and getting them back as far as ESPN’s first ever and ABC’s in a long time. They’re going to do an unbelievable job.”
Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported last month that ESPN would wait until after the Super Bowl to settle Aikman’s future, and Marchand still pegged a new deal as the most likely outcome, though Aikman’s own words since have done plenty to undercut that. Should ESPN need a succession plan, it appears to run through Greg Olsen. Puck’s John Ourand has reported that his best sources expect Olsen to replace Aikman, and Olsen, who has been stuck in Fox’s No. 2 booth since Tom Brady’s arrival, reportedly has a clause in his expiring contract that lets him leave for a No. 1 job.
Until then, the NFL can keep calling it incredible coverage, and ESPN can keep putting off deciding whether it’s willing to pay to keep that coverage together after the Super Bowl.