DID SWIFTIES DISS AL MICHAELS, ONCE TRADED FOR A CARTOON CHARACTER?
The play-by-play legend has been shuttered for the NFL playoffs by NBC, which may have been influenced by swarms of Taylor Swift fans, who didn’t like how he downplayed coverage of her stadium aura
This makes perfect sense in the wackadoodle world of sports broadcasting. Al Michaels, who once was acquired by NBC in a trade for “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,” would lose postseason work because of problematic remarks about Taylor Swift. At 79, Michaels rates among football’s finest play-by-play voices ever and doesn’t want to become, oh, an anti-hero and enter some industry blank space.
He’s there.
When the NFL playoffs begin, NBC has ding-donged him and inserted 26-year-old Noah Eagle, who has been tabbed by Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob” initiative to call the Super Bowl and must need work. Eagle is the son of CBS veteran Ian Eagle, making him a Nepotism Boy, and he’ll join Todd Blackledge as the No. 2 crew in covering one of the network’s four games. Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth, the top crew, will cover the other three. Is it possible Michaels, dogged a year ago for lacking passion in calling Jacksonville’s astounding first-round victory over the Los Angeles Chargers, roiled NBC’s Peacock-fluttering nincompoops with restrained comments about Swift?
In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Michaels downplayed how Amazon Prime would report on Swift when she appeared Oct. 12 for another Travis Kelce game. “What we’re gonna do tonight, everything in moderation,” he said of his Thursday night streaming gig. “The game is still the important element here, by far. That’s our thought. After that, you sort of make it, one of my favorite words, farcical.”
The issue with NBC is that the network — recalling how Tirico went bonkers on Swift early in the season, with Collinsworth almost laughing his way off the set — adores her more than any Swiftie. The network wants her audience, women in their 10s and 20s and 30s and 40s, and doesn’t want Old Man Al mocking her. He kept mentioning the same element in the interview. “Moderation. That’s our word,” he said. “Everything in moderation. What do you do at a certain point? ‘There she is.’ OK. Got it.”
For years, as NBC pushed Tirico into the lead “Sunday Night Football” slot, Michaels hasn’t liked the bosses who replaced him. Arrogance is how the network pushed Bob Costas out the door, preferring the cheerful Tirico’s soft, vanilla takes on Roger Goodell’s domain and common life. When Michaels was pushed away to Amazon, the tension didn’t end, with vice president Greg Hughes confirming the demotion to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand. Understand: TV executives don’t speak to media snoops unless they have a specific reason. Michaels was shocked. Did Swift push him away, making him the latest male to qualify for her future lyrics?
“It’s in my deal,” Michaels told Marchand. “Where are you hearing that from? That’s part of my deal. Are you hearing something that I’m not hearing?”
He knows it now. Once classified as the king of his craft, Michaels is bounced from TV coverage that features a waning Tony Romo, no Tom Brady and a Tirico-Collinsworth duo that eventually will need Aaron Rodgers. Jim Nantz becomes the aw-shucks monarch with Kevin (“Lil’ Baby Kay Kay”) Burkhardt on Fox Sports and Joe Buck waiting for ESPN’s first Super Bowl telecast in 2027.
Noah Eagle? His dad is good, but if I’ve heard Noah, I didn’t know it was him or who he was. “There’s a stigma that comes with the last name and I’m OK with that,” he said.
All I know is, Michaels made it clear at the 2006 Super Bowl that he wanted to leave ABC. He ached to work with John Madden on NBC. The news was delivered to Disney CEO Bob Iger by George Bodenheimer, the ESPN president, who wrote about the exchange in his book.
“George," Iger said, "I'd be willing to let Al Michaels go if you can get us the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC.”
“Who or what is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?” Bodenheimer said.
“Well, it goes back to the very beginning of Walt Disney's career,” Iger said. “Oswald is a revered figure at Disney, and I'd like to get him back.”
The next call was to Dick Ebersol at NBC. Said Bodenheimer: “I opened the conversation by saying, ‘I’m willing to talk to you about letting Al go to NBC, but I gotta have Oswald the Lucky Rabbit back.’ ’’
“What?”
“Yeah, you heard me right. I gotta have Oswald the Lucky Rabbit back.”
“Who or what is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?”
They made the trade happen, Al Michaels for a cartoon character. We will honor him someday — hopefully, later than sooner — and maybe Taylor Swift will show up for the goodbye. She’ll make sure it’s in “moderation.”
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.