Troy Aikman is now one of the highest-paid talents at ESPN and the game analyst on Monday Night Football, but the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback nearly came to the Worldwide Leader two decades earlier when former executive Mark Shapiro pursued him to replace the legendary John Madden.
In a new interview on the Marchand Sports Media podcast, Shapiro revealed his major offer for Aikman and why he didn’t try harder to keep Madden when Monday Night Football jumped from ABC to ESPN in 2005.
“A lot of people would say … that when ESPN got Monday Night Football, and ABC was out of the business, ‘Why didn’t Shapiro just take the crew that was producing Monday night … and Al Michaels and John Madden, and move it over?'” Shapiro told host Andrew Marchand.
But that’s not what Shapiro did. Instead, he kept Joe Theismann from the existing ESPN Sunday night crew and tried to pair him with Al Michaels and… Troy Aikman.
At the time, Aikman was already working at Fox Sports, and Shapiro would need to acquire him to implement his plan.
“I thought it could be really strong, and I wanted to take that shot,” Shapiro said. “I wasn’t going to, (in) this great moment for ESPN, getting Monday Night Football, it wasn’t such a gap that I was going to blow out the ESPN crew.”
Shapiro said he knew that if he didn’t take on lead producer Fred Gaudelli from ABC, he would end up at NBC Sports, which was getting Sunday Night Football.
But he wanted to keep the ESPN crew happy and believed in it.
“What went wrong is I couldn’t close the deal with Aikman,” Shapiro explained. “I offered him $4 million a year at the time, which was unheard of. It was like (Tony) Romo money at the time, which changed everything. I will just tell you that Fox came in, and they countered. They got all the way up to the number that I was offering … so then I was left with Al and Joe Theismann, so we were clearly at that point and inferior product. Not because of Al, but Joe had been there a number of years and we needed another name to offset him.”
Shapiro soon left ESPN and the media business, leaving Michaels out to dry. By then, Madden had already announced his move to NBC alongside the producer Gaudelli, so Michaels followed him to lay a foundation on SNF at NBC.
“It turned into a mess, and it wouldn’t have been that mess if I didn’t leave,” Shapiro said. “But also, if I just went with the easy choice up front, but I don’t regret doing that.”
The musical chairs of NFL broadcasting don’t move often, so this one inflection point rippled deeply across the business. Michaels stayed at NBC far longer than Madden, where he helped develop Cris Collinsworth. And ESPN never quite found its Troy Aikman after Shapiro left until Aikman himself joined in 2022.
