Al Michaels' lifeless call of the Seahawks' overtime winner against the Rams has fans saying his fastball is gone. Credit: Amazon Prime Video
By Sam Neumann on

In what’s becoming an all-too-familiar pattern, Al Michaels had another rough night calling Thursday Night Football.

The legendary broadcaster’s call of the Rams-Seahawks overtime thriller on Thursday felt almost disengaged. As the NFC West rivals traded blows in a game with serious postseason implications, Michaels’ delivery was so flat, so devoid of urgency during Puka Nacua’s go-ahead touchdown from Matthew Stafford that viewers genuinely thought the play had been called back.

Listen to that call and try to tell yourself it matches the moment. You can’t.

“So that was one of the best games of the NFL season, and one of the best Thursday Night Football games, but I got to talk about something else here,” said Kofie Yeboah. “Al Michaels, it’s time to retire, buddy. It’s over. Oh my goodness. Now, don’t get me wrong, Al Michaels is a sports broadcasting legend, but brother, the fastball’s gone; the curveball’s gone; the slider’s gone. It’s just changeups. It’s straight up just change-ups.”

@kofiewhy Al Michaels needs to retire man #NFL #SPORTS ♬ Jazz Mood – Lady-M

But it’s not just content creators like Yeboah who feel this way. This has become a weekly ritual. Every Thursday night, the same complaints flood social media as thousands and thousands of viewers reach the same uncomfortable conclusion week after week.

Thursday night’s performance wasn’t an aberration — it’s become the norm for Michaels on Amazon’s Thursday Night Football package. This has been building throughout his post-NBC tenure, with nearly every week bringing a fresh wave of criticism about his lack of energy and enthusiasm in the booth.

The issue isn’t that Michaels needs to be screaming his guts out on every play. Nobody’s asking him to become Gus Johnson or Kevin Harlan. But there’s a massive gap between manufactured hype and what we’re getting now, which often feels like someone reading the morning traffic report.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that we know what great Al Michaels sounds like. This is the voice of “Do you believe in miracles?” This is someone who’s called Super Bowls, Olympic hockey gold medals, and countless iconic NFL moments. But at 81 years old and in his fourth season calling Thursday Night Football for Prime Video, Michaels seems to be running on fumes.

The timing is off, the energy is gone, and perhaps most damning, he frequently sounds like he’s a few seconds behind the action, as if he’s watching on a delayed feed rather than sitting in the stadium.

This puts Amazon in an incredibly awkward position. Michaels is a legend, and nobody wants to be the one to tell a legend it’s time to hang it up. But Amazon is paying billions of dollars for Thursday Night Football, and the broadcast experience matters. They’ve invested heavily in production quality, studio shows, and the expansion of their NFL coverage. Having a play-by-play announcer who sounds disengaged actively undermines all of that.

The tragedy here is that this should be a celebration of an incredible career, not a weekly referendum on whether it’s time to retire. Michaels has earned the right to go out on his own terms. But when the calls are so noticeably flat that viewers think big plays were called back, when social media erupts every Thursday night with the same concerns, when even those defending Michaels acknowledge the decline, it becomes impossible to ignore.

Kirk Herbstreit, who works alongside Michaels in the booth, has defended his partner against the enthusiastic criticism, noting that Michaels brings credibility and experience. And that’s true. But credibility and experience can’t make up for calls that don’t match the moment.

The question isn’t whether Al Michaels was great. He was — he’s a Hall of Famer for a reason. The question is whether this version of Al Michaels is still serving the broadcasts well, and whether it’s fair to him or to viewers to keep pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

Thursday night was just the latest example of a problem that’s becoming harder to overlook each week. At some point, someone’s going to have to have a difficult conversation.

The only question is whether that happens before or after more nights like this one.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann