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Could Eli Manning be ESPN’s ‘Monday Night Football’ wild card?
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- Could Eli Manning be ESPN’s ‘Monday Night Football’ wild card?
Credit: Geoff Burke-Imagn Images
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ESPN couldn't lure Peyton Manning into the Monday Night Football booth, so it built him a show of his own, and now the Colts are threatening to pry him away from both.
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According to Dan Patrick , the Colts placed their first call to Manning after firing Chris Ballard on Monday, and the conversation went well beyond soliciting candidates for the search, with Patrick's source saying Indianapolis wants to gauge whether Manning would run the front office himself in exchange for an ownership stake in the franchise.
Patrick's source acknowledged that Manning's family is the biggest obstacle; they grew deeply attached to Denver, and their kids are at an age where uprooting them for a move across the country is no small ask, so a homecoming is far from assured. Still, if Peyton does return to Indianapolis, the fallout would extend well beyond the Colts' front office, because ESPN would lose the brother the ManningCast was built around at the very moment it's searching for someone to sit beside Joe Buck, leaving the network paying top dollar for a partnership that suddenly has far less to offer on Monday nights.
THE AIKMAN PROBLEM
ESPN secured one half of its marquee booth in September, signing Buck to a six-year, $108 million extension that keeps him on Monday Night Football through the network's 2031 Super Bowl, and most assumed Troy Aikman's renewal would arrive shortly afterward. Instead, Aikman said talks with ESPN had stalled , and Front Office Sports' Ryan Glasspiegel later reported that he and Buck argued before the Bills-Rams game at SoFi Stadium, where the longtime partners are set to call Super Bowl LXI in February. Aikman did little to push back on the report during an appearance on KCTK The Ticket in Dallas, where he all but confirmed the tension , and he later told sports media writer Jimmy Traina why he fully expects to be gone once his contract runs out.
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"We're in a Super Bowl year. The Super Bowl is Feb. 14. My contract ends in March. It just doesn't seem logical that if they were gonna keep me, something wouldn't be in place before that."
Greg Olsen remains the overwhelming favorite to inherit that seat, with Puck's John Ourand reporting that his best sources expect Olsen to land in the MNF booth when his Fox contract expires, which would finally deliver the No. 1 role Olsen has coveted since Tom Brady supplanted him at Fox in 2024. Fox Sports president Brad Zager has insisted the network wants Olsen back for the long haul, but Fox can no longer offer him a lead booth, and ESPN soon may. Prime Video reportedly extended Kirk Herbstreit, the other marquee analyst who entered the season in the final year of his contract, though the terms of that arrangement remain nebulous.
Beyond Olsen, the speculation has veered into increasingly far-fetched territory, with Pat McAfee insisting he doesn't belong in a football booth and that ESPN has never broached the subject with him, Rob Parker lobbying for Russell Wilson , and Chad Johnson lobbying for himself . The most intriguing alternative came from The Athletic's Andrew Marchand, who suggested last month that ESPN could pair Buck with both Mannings on a rotating basis, assigning Peyton certain weeks and Eli others, while conceding the concept carried a certain novelty.
"It's a little gimmicky, but I actually think it could work. It would be different. And it would be pretty smart."
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HOW THE MANNINGCAST CAME TO BE
The ManningCast exists because Peyton never wanted the booth; he rebuffed ESPN when Jimmy Pitaro and Connor Schell flew to Denver to recruit him after Jason Witten's lone season on Monday Night Football , and his refusal forced the network to move Booger McFarland out of the ill-fated BoogerMobile and into the booth. ESPN finally landed Peyton on Monday nights in 2021 by building a broadcast around his terms, and for a couple of seasons, that gamble looked brilliant.
That early luster has long since faded, as the ManningCast peaked in its debut season when a Giants-Chiefs game drew 1.96 million viewers on ESPN2, then averaged more than 1.1 million per week in its second year before beginning a steady slide. Last season, even with an expanded slate of 12 regular-season games, the show never reached one million viewers for a single broadcast, and this season opened with a meager 705,000 viewers for Broncos-Chiefs , roughly 3% of the 23.2 million who watched Buck and Aikman on the main broadcast.
THERE'S NO MANNINGCAST WITHOUT PEYTON
ESPN's financial commitment hasn't eroded with the audience, since the network signed Omaha Productions to a nine-year extension through 2034 and, according to Marchand, pays the company roughly the same as McAfee's reported salary . Much of that agreement would survive Peyton taking a front-office job, since Omaha also produces podcasts for Brian Windhorst, Mina Kimes, and Scott Van Pelt, along with NFL Honors and the ESPYs, and none of those ventures require Peyton on camera.
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Whatever appeal the ManningCast still has comes from Peyton and Eli giving each other grief and talking through what they see on the field, and most of the complaints about the show focus on how often celebrity guests drag the conversation away from both. Take Peyton out, and Eli is left hosting a guest-heavy talk show that viewers have already tuned out, the opposite of what Awful Announcing Matt Yoder prescribed last month when he argued the ManningCast needed more Mannings and fewer guests .
ESPN also has a ready-made solution for the altcast, since McAfee already hosts his own Field Pass version of MNF on ESPN2 during select weeks, including Monday night , and could absorb that slot on a full-time basis. That would free ESPN to install Eli in the main booth, all while potentially sparing ESPN from committing Aikman-level money, currently $18 million per year, to an outside hire.
WHY ELI WORKS
TV executives had their eyes on Eli long before the ManningCast existed, and when the Giants benched him in 2017, then-CBS chief Les Moonves told TMZ the network would scoop him up in a heartbeat . It's an enviable résumé for any network to build around, with two Super Bowl MVPs won at the expense of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and 16 seasons as the face of the league's most scrutinized market. Buck and Aikman even called the first of those titles, Super Bowl XLII on Fox, which turned on David Tyree's improbable helmet catch and denied the Patriots a perfect season.
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Six seasons of the ManningCast have also given ESPN an extended look at how Eli holds up over three hours of live football, and the results have been more promising than his modest self-assessment suggests. He's the drier, more self-deprecating brother, routinely undercutting Peyton's intensity with sly, well-timed jabs, and when the conversation stays on football, he's often the one offering the night's most perceptive analysis.
One reasonable concern is that a Buck-Eli pairing could feel vanilla, but ESPN's top booth has never needed bombast to draw enormous audiences, as Buck and Aikman attracted 23.2 million viewers in Week 1 on the strength of polish and familiarity. Buck is at his best as the steady, unflappable presence alongside a bigger personality, which is precisely the role he'd need to play next to Eli.
THE CASE AGAINST
The biggest obstacle is Eli himself, who told Adam Schefter in 2022 that he never planned to become a broadcaster and didn't consider himself one, even as the ManningCast became a phenomenon.
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"When I retired, I said I have zero interest in getting into broadcasting. I don't want to do it. I would be horrible at it."
Eli has also cited family time as the primary reason he avoided the booth after retiring, and a full Monday Night Football schedule, capped by a Super Bowl every few years, demands far more than a part-time altcast.
There's also a credible argument that Peyton heading to Indianapolis would make Eli less likely to take the job, since the ManningCast has always been a family venture, and without his brother alongside him, Eli might decide to walk away from TV rather than reinvent himself in a more grueling role. Olsen, meanwhile, is a proven lead analyst who badly wants this job, and ESPN could reasonably value that experience over a famous surname.
PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR MINDS
Then again, athletes reverse course on broadcasting all the time, and J.J. Watt insisted for most of his playing career that he had no interest in the booth before a widely praised first season calling games alongside Ian Eagle at CBS prompted him to admit he had misjudged himself .
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"I said my whole career I didn't want to do it, I didn't think I would enjoy it. And I was wrong."
Olsen remains the likeliest outcome, and Peyton's return to Indianapolis is far from settled, but ESPN's plans could shift in a hurry, because if Peyton goes home, the network would be locked into an expensive Omaha deal with a ManningCast missing its centerpiece and a two-time Super Bowl MVP under contract without an obvious role on Monday nights. ESPN built a new broadcast to get one Manning on the air, and whether it can coax the other into the booth his brother turned down remains to be seen.
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The post Could Eli Manning be ESPN's 'Monday Night Football' wild card? appeared first on Awful Announcing .
