Amazon is in a "holding pattern" as it awaits whether Al Michaels will join Thursday Night Football

New York Post

After calling his 11th Super Bowl on Sunday, Michaels' future will be up in the air since his NBC contract is expiring. Meanwhile, there's speculation that he could be paired at Amazon with Fox's Troy Aikman. "This Michaels deal has been at the 1-yard line for a long time, and Amazon has waited to see if an agreement will finally be pushed across the goal line," says the New York Post's Andrew Marchand, who adds that it's looking likely that Marshawn Lynch and Tony Gonzalez will be part of the Thursday Night Football pregame show.

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• Al Michaels’ career is proof the best broadcasters are two different people: "On the one hand, Michaels is a machine-like play-by-play announcer," says Bryan Curtis. "But Michaels works very hard to tell us he’s not a machine, that he knows about wisecracks and over-unders and the peculiar magic of Malcolm Butler. Put another way, Michaels has a TV professional’s skill but not his blow-dried soul. It’s the same message Joe Buck spent 15 years trying to get across." As Curtis points out, "Michaels was 41 when he called his first Monday Night Football game. He’d already announced several World Series and the Miracle on Ice for ABC. But for a ’70s institution, he counted as a fresh face. In 1985, Monday Night Football had Frank Gifford calling his 15th year of play-by-play, with Joe Namath and O.J. Simpson handling the analysis. Or trying to. ABC was so down on Simpson that it’d replaced him on the Super Bowl broadcast with Joe Theismann, an active player. The next year, Roone Arledge, the presumed emperor-for-life of ABC Sports, was moved out during an ownership change. His replacement, Dennis Swanson, gave Michaels the play-by-play job. Gifford was demoted to analyst...The refurbished Monday Night Football was a show built for the moment in cultural time when the ’80s was turning into the ’90s. "