Media Circus: Here’s who ESPN should pick for its Monday Night Football booth (2024)

It is not often someone who works on-air in sports broadcasting publicly advocates for a job. Privately, on-air talent will lobby harder than a K-Street veteran. But declaring that ambition openly is not something often seen. It’s why I appreciated the honesty of ESPN NFL analyst Louis Riddick when I interviewed him in March 2018 for a sports media podcast. Riddick had no problem letting the world know of his interest in Monday Night Football.

“It is the pinnacle of broadcasting as far as I am concerned, the most iconic position in broadcasting,” Riddick said. “To be involved with Monday Night Football either as a play-by-play person or analyst is something I am hoping I can achieve.”

Riddick was one of 12 potential Monday Night Football analyst candidates — from Jared Allen to Joe Thomas to Kurt Warner — who auditioned in 2018 for the job after Jon Gruden left for the Raiders in January of that year.

The auditions took place over a six-week period in March and April 2018 as each candidate called mock games with Joe Tessitore, who ESPN had tapped to replace Sean McDonough as the voice of the football franchise. Said Tessitore of Riddick’s audition: “The most unique perspective of anybody who called a game, from the front office stuff and knowing the league inside and out. He didn’t just speak X/O and not just big picture, but player development, technique. You can go in any direction with Lou. It does not matter. I found it fascinating to work with him.”

You know what ultimately happened. ESPN decided on a three-person booth featuring Tessitore, Jason Witten and Booger McFarland. Witten was coming off a storied career with the Dallas Cowboys and ESPN was hoping to emulate the success that CBS had plucking Tony Romo immediately off the field and placing him on its top team. The network believed the chemistry would be great, especially given Tessitore and McFarland had a great friendship from their days at the SEC Network.

Two years later, ESPN management finds itself once again searching for a Monday Night Football booth. On Saturday, The Athletic broke the news that Tessitore and McFarland will not return to the program for the 2020 NFL season (whenever that begins). Both are highly thought of by ESPN management and will be reassigned to prominent roles. Ultimately, I think this will turn out to be a terrific turn of events for both. Tessitore was a sensational college football game-caller prior to the MNF job and his amped style is ready-made for college football. He developed a bit of a cult following given how many college football games seem to go down to the wire when he was on the mic (“The Tess Effect”). The Monday Night Football gig obviously has glamour (and a pay raise) but it can be an unforgiving assignment. McFarland was pilloried on social media – and ESPN did not help him with the inane crane idea – but prior to his MNF gig he was a terrific and prepared voice on everything he did, from his work on the SEC Network and as an ABC college football studio analyst.

The replacement for both the Monday Night Football play-by-play role and analyst job will come from inside ESPN. The front-running names have been leaked and the Miami Herald and New York Post have reported that Steve Levy has emerged as the most likely candidate to replace Tessitore on play-by-play. Levy would do a professional job.

What I am about to propose is a roadmap for ESPN to have an excellent booth for this season (whenever it takes place) as well as one that would appeal to the NFL for ESPN’s long-term dream — to become part of the Super Bowl rotation. It is a booth young enough to grow into something great.

If I were ESPN management, my Monday Night Football booth would be Dave Pasch, Kurt Warner and Riddick.

Pasch already works for ESPN. He has been a terrific play-caller in everything he does, be it college football, college basketball, the NBA or anything else. He understands how to let his analysts shine (see his work with Bill Walton or Doris Burke). He has a sense of humor. Here is something you might not know: He has been the radio play-by-play voice of the Arizona Cardinals since 2002. That means he walks into the booth with decades of experience calling the NFL. He would be excellent.

Warner has been a terrific game analyst over the past two seasons working with Kevin Harlan on Westwood One’s Monday Night Football and Super Bowl broadcasts. He’s already committed to working this terrain and he knows the league given his Westwood One assignment and working as a studio analyst for the NFL Network. Warner would give ESPN the Super Bowl-winning quarterback cachet (see failed pursuits of Peyton Manning.) A bonus: He and Pasch have known each other for years and have immense respect for each other. I have been told in the past that contractually Warner could make this work if offered (and if interested).

One of the annoying things about sports broadcasting is the reflexive nature of sports television executives when it comes to chasing big names. The theory goes that a big name helps sell the game with media buyers — and provides a ready-made sell to market the product to the public. There is some truth there. But what is missing from most NFL announcing teams is differentiation. That’s why Tony Romo was a revelation. He saw the game differently and was able to explain that to the audience. Riddick sees the game from the perspective of a personnel director. He also played safety in the NFL for seven years, so he’s a unique hybrid. He’s no-nonsense. He doesn’t do the Jon Gruden shtick. He’s a serious fellow. Would I want that for every moment of a game? No. But I think in a three-person booth Riddick would be an invaluable educational tool. His elevation would also signal that hard work and grind can lead you to the top of the analyst chart in sports broadcasting. As a former safety, he’d give the broadcast someone who saw the field as a player on defense to work with a former quarterback. Best of all worlds.

It’s a booth I think NFL fans, casual and diehard, would respect and appreciate.

The Ink Report

1. Michael Jordan was interviewed three times for The Last Dance Here’s my piece from Sunday on what happened during each interview — and how director Jason Hehir game-planned for interviewing Jordan.

1a. Noted documentarian Ken Burns offered criticism in The Wall Street Journal on the partnership between “The Last Dance” filmmakers and its producing partners (which includes Jordan’s Jump 23 company and the NBA) and how it goes against the journalistic approach that Burns uses for his work. The critique is fair. “The Last Dance” has a ton of journalistic elements but it is by no means an unvarnished view of Jordan. As I wrote before, the only way to tell a comprehensive documentary of Jordan would be to get access to Juanita Vanoy, his former wife, and to go deep into all his business dealings. That isn’t going to happen if you want access to Jordan. But judged on ambition, entertainment and access to a famous subject that rarely lets you in, “The Last Dance” is a massive achievement.

I asked “The Last Dance” director Jason Hehir about Burns’s comments and here is what he said: “I have the highest admiration for Ken Burns. He has been a hero of mine since I was a kid. His body of work is extraordinary. He called me a couple of days ago. Word had gotten back to him that the comments he made to The Wall Street Journal kind of had taken on a life of their own, so he called me to explain the context in which he said what he said. It was really gracious and really classy. This guy is one of the reasons I got into filmmaking, particularly that baseball series in 1994. I vividly remember watching that as a freshman in college. He did say that he looked forward to seeing it. He’s working on seven documentaries of his own right now and taking care of his kids and going through the pandemic like we all are. He said, ‘If anyone knows the feeling of asking someone to put 10 hours aside to watch their work, it’s me. So I will find 500 minutes to watch this.’ It was great to hear from him.

“He (Burns) expressed that his world is a PBS world and they have underwriters and if any of those underwriters are even remotely affiliated with the subject, they’re not allowed to be associated with the project. So those rules that are put in place by PBS are very stringent. Obviously, with this project, we weren’t under the same parameters, We are not working in the same parameters. It should be noted that it’s not Michael’s production company. Michael didn’t have a production company. The Jordan brand — meaning Curtis Polk (who manages the financial and business affairs of Jordan and is an executive with the Hornets) and Estee Portnoy (Jordan’s longtime business manager) — gave notes just like ESPN and Netflix and the NBA gave notes. But those were not final cut notes. With a league such as the NBA or MLB or NFL or NHL, if that is inherently not journalistic if they have editorial input, then sports documentaries would cease to exist. Because you have to license the footage through these entities, so they own it. Of course, they get a say in it. We made it very clear early on in this process that we wanted to tell a comprehensive story. No one was interested in this being a puff piece. Most of all, the Jordan brand and the NBA.

“I had my fears going into it. That they would exercise their right to disagree with certain storylines and to pull certain pieces of footage. But there is never one moment where Michael Jordan or his representatives said you cannot talk about this subject, or this is off-limits. Don’t ask this question. There wasn’t one moment that they said take this out because it doesn’t reflect well on Michael. The moments that we were allowed to include, I’m still surprised that they were OK with us using. He certainly had the right to wield that power and he never did. So it’s tricky. I am a storyteller. That’s the business that I am in. We are given access to tell people’s stories and oftentimes these people are very precious with that access. So I take it very seriously that people have given us the trust and the responsibility to tell their story fairly and accurately.”

2. Great work by ESPN on Sunday morning with its SC Featured “Heroes” feature targeted for Mother’s Day. The conceit was to honor mothers who are on the frontlines fighting COVID-19 and specifically the New York area.

ESPN Feature Unit producers Luis Aldea and Zachary Budman had about 10 days to pull off the feature, which had a great twist: The women would be surprised by their favorite athletes on camera. The athletes included Roger Federer, Derek Jeter, Kyle Lowry and Eli Manning.

“Obviously, the challenges of trying to do this during a pandemic greatly complicated their task,” said ESPN senior coordinating producer José Morales. “First, we needed to identify the women we’d focus on in our story. With the help of ESPN talent producers Darren Demeterio and Audrah Cates we made several inquiries to New York area hospitals and ultimately found Dr. Melissa Leber, Dr. Leslie Bottrell, and Nurse Practitioner Christianne Calderon. Their athletic backgrounds, fandom, but most importantly their stories, really resonated with us. They are truly remarkable women and moms.”

ESPN worked with a company called HSC.tv to shoot in a contactless studio where subjects could enter and sit down in front of a camera and be interviewed virtually face-to-face by anyone in the world. ESPN director of photography Bryan Brousseau operated the cameras from a building in Astoria, N.Y. while the women were interviewed by Tom Rinaldi from his home in New Jersey. Cates and Demeterio helped land Jeter and Manning while Rinaldi reached out to Federer

“One of the most remarkable things about this project is everyone involved on the ESPN team worked from home,” Morales said. “Luis and Zachary did an incredible job producing the piece while editors Katelin Stevens, Justin Belcher and Adam Schaub all edited various parts of the project from their home edit systems. I guess this is the ‘new normal’ for what we are currently experiencing.”

Here are the Federer and Manning, Jeter and Lowry pieces.

2a. Turner Sports will air Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Charity, which features Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson (joined by Tom Brady and Peyton Manning) competing at the Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. The event will be simulcast on TNT, TBS, truTV and HLN on May 24, at 3 p.m. ET, with pre-match coverage available in the Bleacher Report app. WarnerMedia and the golfers will collectively make a charitable donation of $10 million to benefit COVID-19 relief.

The competition pits Woods and Manning versus Mickelson and Brady in Team Match Play with a Four-Ball (Best Ball) format on the front nine and a Modified Alternate Shot format on the back nine, where each participant will tee off and then the team will play alternate shots from the selected drive.

2b. Ambitious and informative projects on sports networks deserve praise and ESPN delivered on May 1 with E:60’s “Project 11,” which documented more than a year in the life of NFL quarterback Alex Smith overcoming a life-threatening infection on his leg that included the possibility of amputation. The one-hour program — produced by Dan Lindberg and reported by ESPN injury analyst Stephania Bell and Lindberg — was culled from more than 50 hours of original video. The E60 crew spent 14 days shooting with Smith and his family and 27 shooting days in total. The first day of filming was Feb. 11, 2019, and the project finished the day before it aired. Footage included access to doctors, Smith’s family and friends, and graphic images of what Smith had to overcome.

“This was the most unparalleled access I’ve had in 11 years of doing this job,” Lindberg said in an email. “Alex is normally a very private person, not to mention a veteran player at one of the most high profile positions in sports. Needless to say, we were shocked with what they were comfortable with when we were coming up with our filming plan. It all came down to Alex and his wife, and how they wanted this told. They wanted it to be real. They were comfortable with us being there for moments of good news, but they also were comfortable with us being there and capturing moments that might not be positive or maybe where a setback had occurred.

“While Alex is in a great place now, when we started filming with him there was still a lot of uncertainty. He knew the infection could possibly return. He knew his leg was not guaranteed to heal — and there was a chance he could still lose it. He was okay with all of that. He wanted to tell the story however it was going to unfold.”

3. Episode 98 of the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch features the sports television journalist and host Bob Costas, who currently calls baseball and hosts specials for the MLB Network. In this podcast, Costas discusses his role in launching and developing the Concussion Legacy Foundation’s CLF Media Project, the first and only concussion reporting training designed specifically for sports media professionals; the importance of proper terminology for broadcasters when it comes to head trauma; whether there are limits to how far a rightsholder broadcaster can go when it comes to discussing head trauma prior to or during a game; how he views his final years with NBC Sports; appearing in “The Last Dance”; the prospects of an Olympics in Tokyo in 2021; his view on whether we will see a Tokyo Olympics in 2021; the prospect of broadcasting baseball with no crowd and calling games either remotely or within a bubble; knowing one’s career arc, and much more.

You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and more.

4. Sports pieces of note:

• Tony Gwynn: 60 things to know on what would have been his 60th birthday. By Kirk Kenney of the San Diego Union-Tribune.
• Via Sam Miller of ESPN.com: Happy 59th! Or is it 58th? Cracking the mystery of Don Mattingly’s birthday.
• The Flukish, Fascinating Rise — and Sudden Disappearance — of the 2019 Kentucky Derby Champion. By Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated.
• NASCAR and time. By Jacob Feldman of The Sunday Long Read.
• Via Bill Shea of The Athletic: An inside look at how sports shaped Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo” journalism.
• Inside Jacksonville’s draft. By Michael Silver of NFL.com.
• My priceless, worthless baseball cards. By Ryan Hockensmith of ESPN.com.
• An oral history of Allen Iverson’s epic rant. By Rich Hofmann of The Athletic.
• What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America. By Marty Munson of Men’s Health.

COVID-19 pieces:

• The coronavirus pandemic is steeped in uncertainty, confusion, shifting information, and muddled messages. Here’s a guide to cutting through it all. By Ed Yong of The Atlantic.
• In the pandemic, everyone is a moral relativist. By John F. Harris of Politico.
• Via The Toronto Star’s Douglas Quan: Coronavirus closed the border. But friends, couples and families living in B.C. and Washington State are still determined to find ways to meet up. Here’s what we found one afternoon along Zero Avenue.
• She begged her virus-stricken partner to go to the hospital. He refused until it was too late. By Michael E. Miller of The Washington Post.
• Can I really get sick from the coronavirus twice? (and 10 other pandemic questions). Via infectious disease specialist Dr. Ilan Schwartz for Maclean’s.
• Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not. By Charles Duhigg for The New Yorker.
• The Future of Travel. By writers of the New York Times.
• Scientists know ways to help stop viruses from spreading on airplanes. They’re too late for this pandemic. By Michael Laris of The Washington Post.
• Via Doug Bock Clark of GQ: Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess.
• We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. By Garrett M. Graff.
• I witnessed a man’s coronavirus funeral when his family could not. This is his story. By Steve Politi of NJ.com.
• I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. By Ray Suarez, for The Washington Post.
• In parts of Asia and Australia, people are going out — but social distancing and other restrictions have become the new normal. By Javier C. Hernández and Su-Hyun Lee of the New York Times.
• On what life becomes when COVID-19 won’t go away. By Darlene Krawetz, as told to Eli Saslow.
• We’ve known how to make healthier buildings for decades. COVID-19 may be the push to make them a reality. By Nicole Wetsman of The Verge.
• How Pandemics End. By Gina Kolata of the New York Times.

Non-sports pieces of note:

• Via New York Times Magazine: How V-E Day Echoed Around the World.
• I drove 2,300 miles to get home. I saw how uncertain the future is for black Americans. By William C. Rhoden for National Geographic.
• How Spanish scientists and soldiers made an epic journey home as the world locked down around them. By Robin George Andrews of Atlas Obscura.
• The Future of Korean Politics Might Be This Defector From Pyongyang. By Melissa Chan of Foreign Policy.
• Baseball season always means my mom’s chicken. Without the games, it’s filling a void. By Manuel Roig-Franzi of The Washington Post.
• The Hollywood Vigilante. By Erika Hayasaki of Marie Claire.
• Those who say Edward Hopper is the artist of social distancing may be wrong. By Menachem Wecker of The Washington Post.
• Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup. By Shawn Yuan of Wired.
• What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out. By Taffy-Brodesser-Akner of the New York Times.

(Photo: Mike Trummel / ESPN Images)

Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He previously worked for 20 years for Sports Illustrated, where he covered seven Olympic Games, multiple NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard also hosts a weekly sports media podcast. Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch