Peyton Manning is apparently not ready to appear on your television screen every Monday Night this fall. The former NFL quarterback and two-time Super Bowl champion was reportedly courted by ESPN to reshuffle its premiere NFL broadcast but will not take the job after it was apparently offered to him.
Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported Monday that Manning won’t be on the four-letter this fall after turning down ESPN’s offer to make him part of the broadcast that has seen its lineup change consistently over the last few seasons.
Sources say the overriding factor was whether Manning finally wanted to enter the broadcast booth and commit to the weekly schedule in the fall. The answer remains no.
Manning has declined to be an MNF analyst on multiple occasions, turning down basically every network since he retired from the NFL in 2016.
It’s no surprise that Manning has been pursued by “basically every network,” as he’s still one of the biggest names in football despite five years out of the game. ESPN has been the long assumed fit if he were to enter the booth, as he already worked with them on an ESPN+ show and was expected to land a considerable payday akin to what Tony Romo got at CBS if that role extended to covering live football for the network.
As Marchand reported again on Monday, ESPN’s initial idea was to pair Manning with Al Michaels if the cable network was able to pry the latter away from NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast. That move apparently failed, and now it seems that Manning won’t be coming to ESPN, either.
[via NY Post]
