The Alliance of American Football begins in seven days and the league is putting the final touches on the launch of their debut season. The league formed by Charlie and Dick Ebersol has a TV deal with CBS, NFL Network and Turner Sports with a streaming deal from B/R Live and CBS revealed their broadcast teams for the opening doubleheader on CBS and weekly games on CBSSN.
Now it appears we have a much clearer picture on who is going to be on AAF broadcasts this season. From the Twitter account @FakeRudyMartzke, notable people such as Marvin Lewis, Terrell Davis, Maurice Jones-Drew, Andrew Siciliano and Steve Mariucci, among others, will be on AAF games in some capacity.
Around the Dial: Alliance of American Football (AAF) will have the talented Alex Flanagan as host of its league pregame, halftime, and postgame shows. Flanagan was the networks first on-air hire.
— Rudy Martzke (@FakeRudyMartzke) February 1, 2019
Around the Dial: AAF will have a rotating group of analysts joining Alex Flanagan in-studio throughout the season. Rod Woodson, Shaun O'Hara, Cynthia Frelund, Terrell Davis, Kevin Carter and Marvin Lewis.
— Rudy Martzke (@FakeRudyMartzke) February 1, 2019
Around the Dial: Turner Sports will have Brian Anderson, Marvin Lewis and Maurice Jones-Drew on the 1 regular season game (Saltlake/Birmingham) that they will televise. Game will air on TNT.
— Rudy Martzke (@FakeRudyMartzke) February 1, 2019
Around the Dial: AAF will have a talented group of play by play broadcasters. Mark Malone will call B/R Live games, Andrew Siciliano, Dan Hellie, Matt Money Smith, Spero Dedes, Andrew Catalon, and Ben Holden.
— Rudy Martzke (@FakeRudyMartzke) February 1, 2019
Around the Dial: AAF have assembled a talented group of game analysts. They include Marvin Lewis, Gary Danielson, Trent Green, Adam Archuleta, Tiki Barber, Maurice Jones-Drew, Steve Mariucci, David Carr, Brock Huard, and Shaun O'Hara,
— Rudy Martzke (@FakeRudyMartzke) February 1, 2019
Don’t let the username fool you, the person behind @FakeRudyMartzke has proven to be reliable in breaking news before many. The account has previously been correct about Danny Kanell and Les Miles going to Fox in 2017 as well as Allie LaForce going to Turner Sports and Brent Musburger doing radio play-by-play for the Raiders.
Some of these names shouldn’t be surprising. Given that CBS and NFL Network have a TV deal, it makes sense that some of these people also do NFL for their respective networks. Plus, CBS revealed about a month ago that Spero Dedes, Trent Green, Tiki Barber and Jamie Erdahl would be working one half of CBS’ opening weekend broadcast with Andrew Catalon, Gary Danielson and Melanie Collins working the other game. And then Ben Holden, Adam Archuleta and John Schriffen would be doing weekly games on CBSSN.
But there is a mix of new and interesting names working AAF games; most notably, recently fired longtime Bengals coach Marvin Lewis. While Lewis is doing the one TNT regular season game with Brian Anderson and Maurice Jones-Drew (on February 16 before NBA All-Star Saturday Night), it appears he will also be in the studio with host Alex Flanagan during the season. Andrew Siciliano, who also does play-by-play for Rams preseason games, is breaking out of his usual role of doing NFL Red Zone for DirecTV to do play-by-play in the AAF.
With just a maximum of four games a week and 40 games total for the regular season, it’s clear that many people working AAF games will not be working the full regular season. Some, like Barber or Danielson will probably only have a game or two throughout the season. But with just a week to go until the inaugural season begins, it seems to be all systems go on the TV side for the AAF to start giving us spring football.
