Can the $100m duo of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman save ESPN’s Monday Night Football?

The streaming wars have come for professional football. Amazon spent the better part of 12 months backing up the Brinks trucks to try to lure anyone and everyone away from the traditional NFL broadcasters to prop up its new Thursday Night Football vehicle – ultimately landing Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit for a reported $24m per year combined.

And while Amazon was expected to be the great disruptor in the broadcasting arms race, it’s at one of the traditional networks that the merry-go-round has had its most transformative effect. ESPN pinched Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox, handing over a Friday night college football game for the rights to pay the duo in excess of $100m over five years to rejuvenate its flagging Monday Night Football [shudders] brand.

ESPN’s marquee property has been paddling upstream ever since a pre-scandal Jon Gruden skedaddled back to coaching in 2018. There was the Jason Witten debacle; the BoogerMobile; leaps from one ill-fated booth to the next. The network’s bid to replicate the success of Tony Romo over on CBS was a flop: take a just-retired Cowboys player (in this case Witten) with little to no professional broadcasting experience and start the tape rolling. In Witten’s case, it was a mess.

Those Witten days were the nadir, dragging the league’s once-formidable booth to the bottom of the pack. The most recent installment of Monday Night Football was fine: a smorgasbord of banalities piloted by the ever-shouty Steve Levy, offset by the savvy analysis of Louis Riddick and Brian Griese – a combination who were good individually but struggled as a collective.

But the broadcast’s biggest problem was its own sister show: The Manningcast. While the main broadcast dwarfed the viewing figures of