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Adam Amin opens up on Mark Sanchez fallout: ‘It hurts my heart’
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- Adam Amin opens up on Mark Sanchez fallout: ‘It hurts my heart’
Photo Credit: Fox
Adam Amin and Mark Sanchez were just hitting their stride as Fox's No. 4 NFL team when a predawn confrontation in downtown Indianapolis brought Sanchez's tenure at the network to a sudden, ugly end.
Sanchez was in town to call Raiders-Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium, and around 12:30 that Saturday morning, roughly 36 hours before kickoff, he confronted a 69-year-old truck driver over where the man had parked at a downtown hotel loading dock. The driver told police that the former New York Jets quarterback smelled of alcohol and was slurring his speech, and that Sanchez climbed into the cab of his truck despite being told not to enter. Sanchez was arrested in his hospital bed later that day , and prosecutors soon upgraded the case to include felony battery after reviewing the severity of the driver's injuries.
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Fox parted ways with Sanchez a month later, on the same day it introduced Drew Brees as his replacement. After repeated trial delays , Sanchez moved to plead guilty in September , though it still isn't known which charges the plea covers. His change-of-plea hearing has since been pushed to January 2027 after the judge recused herself, even as he and the driver reached a tentative agreement to settle the civil suit.
Nearly a year later, Amin spoke warmly about the partner he lost during a recent appearance on Andrew Marchand's Marchand Sports Media podcast, though with Sanchez's criminal case still pending, he stopped well short of weighing in on what happened that night.
"Regardless of any details you want to parse on it and take aside, I understand people want to do that," Amin continued. "They're going to do that, especially when there's legal proceedings involved. And obviously, I don't want to comment too much on that just for everybody else's sake. But it hurts no matter what. It hurts. It hurts to see how it happened. It hurts that other people were involved and seemingly suffered consequences in that as well, physically. It hurts my heart. I only wish the best for him."
Fox had less than two days to find someone for Raiders-Colts, which Sanchez was set to call with Chris Myers while Amin worked the MLB postseason. The network turned to Brady Quinn , who was in Ann Arbor with the Big Noon Kickoff crew when the news broke. Quinn called the game on roughly 26 hours' notice , hiring a driver for his van so he could take Zoom prep calls all the way to Lucas Oil Stadium. Mark Schlereth filled the next opening as Sanchez's future at the network grew murkier. When Amin returned to football, he said he worked a few weeks with Greg Olsen, then teamed with Kurt Warner for NFL Network's coverage of Falcons-Colts in Berlin, where the two struggled to make sense of Raheem Morris' clock management .
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Few broadcasters at Fox shoulder a schedule as varied as Amin's. His year runs from the World Baseball Classic in March through the MLB postseason, where he called a classic Tigers-Mariners Game 5 last October, and it includes NFL Sundays in the fall before he heads back to Chicago to call the Bulls on CHSN.
"I've had 200-some odd analysts between ESPN and then my days at Fox and doing everything else. I've worked with a lot of people. So I'm used to learning people, learning their rhythms, their timing. That's something I've tried to be good at over time. That's an Ian Eagle lesson that he taught me."
As Amin explained it, Eagle's point was that a play-by-play voice has to learn what his analyst needs and then shape the broadcast around those strengths. That became Amin's job again in November, when Fox hired Drew Brees to replace Sanchez full-time and Amin started over with his fifth partner in about six weeks. Amin could weather the turnover, but he worried more about the producers, directors, and the folks in the truck who had to rebuild the broadcast around a new analyst week after week.
"I think it's hard for our producer, our director, Kristina, our excellent reporter, the folks in the truck," he said. "It's a lot of a whirlwind for them too. And I don't want to lose sight of the fact that everybody had to work really hard to make sure that they were okay. That's a jarring thing to be a part of, even peripherally. And it sucks, man. It sucks. But we go on, we march on, we do the job that we're assigned to do."
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Amin and Brees are back together for a second season, but Amin is starting over again in Chicago. Stacey King, the Bulls analyst he credited with making him a better broadcaster , died this year. The team marked its opener by calling the first quarter without an analyst before turning to a rotation of former players and broadcasters to fill the seat beside him.
The post Adam Amin opens up on Mark Sanchez fallout: 'It hurts my heart' appeared first on Awful Announcing .
