Less than a week after ESPN reportedly struck a new deal with Joe Buck, the status of his longtime partner Troy Aikman is seemingly up in the air.
Aikman said on the latest edition of the “Sports Media Podcast” with Richard Deitsch that he had expected to reach an extension with the network prior to the start of the new season and is unsure when a new deal might be struck. “I thought something would be done prior to the start of this season,” Aikman said, “I’ve never gone into the last year of a contract ever since I signed with the Dallas Cowboys. And so I thought that it would be done. It’s not. When it might get done, if it gets done, is anyone’s guess. And it’s really not something that I’m putting a lot of energy into.”
Aikman joined ESPN in 2022 after a two-decade tenure with Fox Sports, most of which was spent as the network’s lead NFL analyst. Toward the end of his final Fox contract in 2022, he was candid in multiple interviews about the uncertainty of his status with the network and his interest in a potential role on Amazon Prime Video’s “Thursday Night Football.”
His comments to Deitsch this weekend fall well short of the uncertainty he expressed four years ago, when he said on-the-record that he was unsure whether he would be working for Fox, Amazon, or both (ultimately neither).
ESPN surprised the industry in acquiring both Aikman and his Fox longtime partner Joe Buck, who per Andrew Marchand of The Athletic earlier this week reached a new six-year contract extension to remain with the network. Aikman said he has had no conversations with ESPN executives about what Buck’s reported extension means for his own negotiations, but there is “no question” it would be a factor in his decision. “How much of that is my decision, I guess is yet to be determined,” Aikman said. “Would I like to continue working with Joe Buck moving down the road? 100%.”
Aikman is clearly cognizant of the value he and Buck have to ESPN beyond simply calling games. “I came over in 2022 in large part to kind of help mend the relationship with ESPN and the NFL,” he told Deitsch, also crediting Buck and others. “I feel like the reason that I was brought over, I fulfilled whatever obligations they were expecting from me. So much so that … the league now owns 10% of the network. So I would say the fence has been mended.”
ESPN and the NFL famously had a falling out during the late years of John Skipper’s tenure as president of the company — over issues that included unflattering reporting about league matters on since-shuttered programs like “Outside the Lines” — and Skipper’s successor Jimmy Pitaro set as one of his primary goals to mend fences with the league.
Less than a decade after the NFL reportedly flirted with taking away ESPN’s annual Wild Card playoff game, the network and league are as intertwined as at any point in their respective histories. As Aikman noted twice in the interview, ESPN reached a deal last summer to acquire ownership of NFL Media assets, including NFL Network, in exchange for the league vesting a 10 percent stake in the company.
While the acquisition of Buck and Aikman was widely seen as a dramatic improvement over the in-house broadcast teams ESPN had used for “MNF” in prior years, it should be noted that the relationship between ESPN and the NFL was already improving before their 2022 arrival. ESPN acquired its Super Bowl rights in 2021, when the idea of either Buck or Aikman leaving Fox seemed remote.
