The "Collinsworth Slide" isn't the only thing that will be changing during NBC's coverage of Sunday Night Football in 2020.
Al Michaels - alongside Cris Collinsworth - will call Thursday's NFL season opener between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs. However, the 75-year-old's workload is being managed more during the 2020 season than it has in the past.
"I've been involved in the process, and I think it's great," Michaels told Peter King. "It's great for Mike [Tirico] and it's great for me. This is, it seems like year 900, but it's 35, which is pretty amazing when I look back at 35 years of doing the NFL since 1986. I live in Los Angeles, and throughout the course of recent history, LA didn't have a team for over 20 years. The 49ers were good and then bad, so we didn't see them very often. And my schedule would often compel me to go cross country, six, seven, eight weeks in a row."
Some NFL teams will just stay on the opposite coast if they play consecutive weeks there, rather than returning home. Michaels says that while he would do that once in a while, he's "a home body" that normally returned home to Los Angeles after each game to see his family.
Michaels also explained how valuable the addition of Mike Tirico, who joined NBC in 2016, has been in allowing him to ease his schedule.
"We brought Mike in 2016 after he had done 10 years on Monday Night Football, and I had done the prior 20," Michaels continued. "We thought we were going to wind up with Thursday Night Football. We had half a package in 2016 and 2017, I did the Thursday games in 2016, Mike did them in 2017. Then, FOX came in and got the package. So Mike came over partially to be a part of the NFL, but it wasn't available at that particular point because of the rights negotiations.
"So, I think right now this works out for me perfectly. Mike comes in, he does the third week of the season..which is Green Bay at New Orleans...then I'm back for six or seven weeks...then Mike does Thanksgiving, the Sunday after Thanksgiving and maybe a game or two down the line...we have two Wild Card games. So, as it turns out, I think we have, counting the Wild Card games, something like 21 or 22 games, of which I'll do roughly 17."
Michaels has been announcing sporting events so long that he called the 1980 "Miracle on Ice," where the United States upset the Soviet Union in the hockey semifinals. He's been a national NFL voice since 1986, when he began calling Monday Night Football for ABC, a role he stayed in through the 2005 season. Since 2006, he's been at NBC, and he's been a large part of Sunday Night Football becoming the No. 1 program on television.
Still as popular as ever, ESPN reportedly wanted to poach Michaels from NBC to pair with Peyton Manning on Monday Night Football, which has become a shell of its former self, ironically since Tirico left after the 2015 season. NBC balked at the request to part with Michaels, whose contract with the network reportedly runs through 2021. There's long been a thought that Michaels could retire after the 2021 season, with NBC set to broadcast that year's Super Bowl in Los Angeles. But while he joked that he doesn't want to broadcast as long as Vin Scully did for the Dodgers, you don't get the sense that Michaels feels like retirement is imminent.
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