This past offseason, quarterback-turned-broadcaster Troy Aikman made the decision to leave Fox and join ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast crew. But it seems like Aikman’s time with ESPN is off to a rocky start.
On Friday afternoon, Sean Kealey of Awful Announcing wrote a piece detailing Aikman’s rocky relationship with the Monday Night Football crew, and it included some pretty eye-opening allegations from members of the broadcast crew and sources close to the situation.
“It all started week one,” a contractor on the MNF team told Awful Announcing. “He was dogging the crew and gear on the air when he couldn’t figure his telestrator out. He couldn’t figure it out because he shows up on game day. Didn’t practice. So before halftime, our director had already gotten operations to call someone at Fox, find out exactly what model he used for years prior, and had it shipped in for the next game.”
The sources claimed that Aikman was not willing to spend time pre-planning, practicing, or interacting with the team.
“Troy travels on his private jet on Monday mornings and flies home after the game,” a source said. “He could not be further removed from the crew and I would confidently say that he knows maybe 10 people on a crew of like 150+ people.”
“Never came to a camera meeting. No crew outings. Nothing. You’d think someone who is going into a long-term, big-money contract at a new network would come in and try to make it home. Not at all,” another source said.
They’re pretty concerning quotes, and the NFL world had plenty to say about it on Twitter.
Sounds like everyone who works at @espn hates Aikman as much as the people that have to listen to him broadcast https://t.co/RrMJVqPFp1
— Nathan Baliva (@nbaliva) March 17, 2023
https://twitter.com/thompsoncs9/status/1636540669685645314?s=20
He wanted the production team to tell him that he’s more handsome than Joe Montana and Steve Young combined.
— ᵏʸˡᵉ (@49ersKyle) March 17, 2023
If the crew is this upset, this is certainly something ESPN is going to want to figure out sooner than later.