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During Troy Aikman’s appearance before Commanders-49ers on Monday Night Countdown, he heaped praise on San Francisco for rewarding loyal players like Brock Purdy and George Kittle with multimillion-dollar contract extensions. “Everybody’s getting paid,” noted Aikman.
The same, however, cannot be said for Aikman and ESPN.
Five days after Front Office Sports’s Ryan Glasspiegel reported that “tension” between 25-year TV partners Aikman and Joe Buck exploded into an argument before last week’s broadcast, Aikman and Buck returned to call Monday Night Football. Throughout this week’s game, it was purely business as usual, with all of their efforts focused on the Commanders-49ers matchup they were calling.
Neither Buck nor Aikman addressed the situation during the intro to Monday’s game. That trend continued throughout San Francisco’s 23–17 victory over Washington, despite Aikman’s contract status being one of the biggest stories in sports media—and football, for that matter.
At this point, ESPN hasn’t offered the three-time Super Bowl champion a formal extension of his five-year, $90 million contract that expires after the worldwide leader’s first Super Bowl telecast on Feb. 14, 2027, Glasspiegel reported last week. In fact, it’s looking increasingly likely that Aikman will play out his contract and seek what he calls a new “landing spot” with possible employers like CBS Sports, Amazon Prime Video, or Netflix.
Meanwhile, Buck is sitting pretty after inking a six-year, $108 million extension that will take him through ESPN’s second Super Bowl after the 2030 NFL season.
As you would expect from two consummate TV veterans, Aikman and Buck didn’t let their off-the-air soap opera impact their telecast. Why should they mess with success? The previous week’s MNF telecast of Bills-Rams averaged a broadcast TV–like 19.8 million viewers. With Aikman and Buck leading the way in the broadcast booth, MNF is off to its best five-week start since acquiring the package in 2006. The iconic primetime package is averaging 19.3 million viewers through Week 5—up 16% over the same period in 2025.
In multiple interviews last week, Aikman made it clear he’ll remain with ESPN through the Super Bowl, after which his contract is set to expire. But at the same time, all signs point to that being the end of the Buck-Aikman partnership, with the former Cowboys quarterback telling a Dallas radio station last week that he’s already eyeing his post-ESPN career.
“I think there’s probably a time and a place for all that to be discussed,” Aikman said on 96.7 The Ticket. “I don’t know if now is the time. I don’t know that it’s hard to figure out kind of what’s happened. But I’ll broadcast through this season and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens. But I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this year does hold and with the Super Bowl and all that and where my next landing spot might be.”
