Not since the city of Detroit wanted his head has Jimmy Kimmel been so despised.
Kimmel appeared on Monday Night Football this week to promote his late night ABC talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel had already made an appearance on MNF last season, where he showed he had no qualms about tweaking the broadcast team. During that appearance, Kimmel asked then-analyst Joe Theismann how his leg was feeling, and said “John Madden would have loved this if he were alive today” when it began snowing on the field. With that in mind, one imagines that the powers-that-be at ESPN knew what they were getting into when booking Kimmel a second time.
Evidently, they did not. Kimmel has been banished from Monday Night Football after making one too many cracks about former analyst Theismann.
MNF producer Jay Rothman called Kimmel’s comments “classless and disappointing.” ESPN may have been extra sensitive to bringing up Theismann, especially after recent comments where the former analyst referred to MNF as the Tony Kornheiser show.
Theismann, for his part, took the news of Kimmel’s banishment as another opportunity to chide ESPN for turning Monday Night Football into a more “issue-oriented” broadcast, indicating to Richard Sandomir of the New York Times “that he is not fully engaged in ‘Monday Night’“, and was watching CSI: Miami during several points of the game.
Link to New York Times article found via The Fanhouse.
