Announcing Monday Night Football for ESPN is one of the most coveted jobs in sports broadcasting. But when ESPN offered the role to basketball legend Charles Barkley, he turned it down without giving it a second thought.
“I only comment on basketball,” Barkley insisted while appearing as a guest on the debut episode of The Jim Brockmire Podcast. “They offered me Monday Night Football. I said, ‘I like football, but I’m not going to be one of these jackasses who gets on TV and acts like he knows about football.’”
Barkley, who has served as an NBA analyst for TNT since his retirement in 2000, shared this surprising revelation with Brockmire (played by longtime voice actor Hank Azaria) while discussing the prevalence of trolls on social media. The hoops Hall-of-Famer didn’t specify how long ago the offer came or what the financial figures entailed, though it doesn’t sound like he ever truly considered leaving TNT for a seat in the hallowed MNF booth.
Despite its prestige, the Monday Night Football has been a revolving door in recent years with ESPN still trying to find the right combination. Lead play-by-play voice Mike Tirico and color commentator Jon Gruden had worked together for the better part of a decade before Tirico’s departure from ESPN in 2016. Gruden left shortly after, returning to the NFL coaching ranks with the Raiders in 2018. Since that time, the network has cycled through a variety of announcing teams with Steve Levy, Louis Riddick and Brian Griese comprising ESPN’s current MNF lineup.
MNF has employed analysts from outside the football realm before including comedian Dennis Miller, who held the gig from 2000-01. However, ABC’s short-lived Miller experiment was largely a flop. ESPN has frequently pursued Peyton Manning for a position on Monday Night Football (he already hosts a show on the company’s streaming platform, ESPN+), though obviously that has yet to materialize.
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