Al Michaels is just not going to feign excitement at this stage in his legendary profession.
Michaels, 78, is entering his second season calling the “Thursday Night Football” package alongside Kirk Herbstreit on Amazon’s Prime Video service.
He participated in a lengthy feature with Sports Business Journal, and shrugged off the doubters who thought he must have showed more enthusiasm for the games last 12 months.
“Look, sometimes I’ll take some s–t,” Michaels said.
“People say, ‘He didn’t get excited enough.’ What do you would like me to do? Scream, holler, yell the sport? That ain’t me. That ain’t [Joe] Buck, that ain’t [Jim] Nantz. I can’t concentrate to anti-social media. We live in a rustic with 330 million people. And if eight people rip you on social media, I’m going, ‘huh?’
“Now anybody sitting in a basement has a platform. You possibly can’t let things like that distress you. I’ve been doing this for thus long. And I wouldn’t be here at this point still doing a significant package if I used to be doing it the unsuitable way.”
Earlier this 12 months, after Amazon’s first-year schedule had concluded, Michaels was brutally honest concerning the slate of games.
“I believe I’m to the purpose in my life and profession, having watched sports since I used to be 6 years old, I feel what the group feels,” Michaels told The Athletic.
“The Denver-Indianapolis game [in] Week 4 was a dreadful game. No other strategy to describe it. No touchdowns.
“The truth is, at one point through the game, I said to [analyst] Kirk [Herbstreit], ‘Is it possible this game could possibly be so bad that it’s actually good?’ He’d never heard that from a partner and went, ‘No!’”
Within the Sports Business Journal story, Michaels said he was warned by his brother, David, that he could get in trouble for bashing the slate of games.
“No, I’m not. Watch what happens,” Michaels responded.
Amazon has a reasonably good slate of games this season, including Jets-Dolphins on Black Friday and Giants-49ers in Week 3, but there may be also a probability we get reminders of last 12 months’s games when the Bears play the Commanders and Panthers on Thursday nights.
