Jason Witten was taken aback by the barrage of Monday Night Football criticism

The Ringer

Witten, who revealed Thursday he's returning to the Dallas Cowboys after an oft-criticized one-year stint as an ESPN MNF analyst, offered some insight into his first year on the job during Super Bowl week in an interview with The Ringer's Bryan Curtis. "For Witten, the weirdest thing about doing Monday Night Football was the criticism," says Curtis. "Witten had never gotten bad press in his life. Now, on TV, he was getting his ass kicked on Twitter every week. It started in his first preseason game, when he appeared on screen holding his ESPN microphone almost directly in front of his face. Jason, you wanted to say, we can SEE you. You’re on TV. Witten offered the world a small treasury of malapropisms. 'He pulls another rabbit out of his head.' The new roughing-the-passer rule was 'a little bit to the left wing.' Witten was always talking about how much he loved 'ball'...But once Twitter is in your head, it’s hard to get it out. After a game, Witten didn’t even need to look at it. He could tell if he screwed up just by glancing at his phone. When he’d had a bad game, his texts said something like, Hang in there." Witten even went viral in his final appearance on ESPN, when he broke the Pro Bowl trophy. ALSO: ESPN expected Witten to return to MNF next season and wasn't prepared for his announcement.