Dec 19, 2024; Inglewood, California, USA; Sportscaster Al Michaels talks with Los Angeles Chargers President of football operations John Spanos prior to the game against the Denver Broncos at SoFi Stadium. Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
By Sam Neumann on

Al Michaels picked quite the day to lean into his gambling references harder than usual.

On Thursday night, as the Chargers blew out the Vikings 37-10 on Thursday Night Football, the 80-year-old broadcasting legend couldn’t resist making his trademark nods to the betting lines. Michaels has been doing this for decades, and nobody bats an eye anymore.

But Thursday was different.

Earlier that same day, the FBI announced a massive gambling investigation that led to the arrests of Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, and former NBA player Damon Jones. The charges included insider sports betting, mafia-backed, rigged poker games, wire fraud, money laundering, and extortion. More than 30 people were arrested across 11 states.

In other words, probably not the ideal moment to start dropping hints about the over/under.

But Al Michaels isn’t most broadcasters. With the game already decided and the Chargers about to add a field goal to their comfortable lead approaching the two-minute warning, Michaels did what he’s done countless times before. He acknowledged reality.

“Normally, a game like this, you think it is Over,” Michaels said. “But it’s not quite Over. You know what I mean?… I’ll be punished again… It’s close to being Over… I don’t want to call it Over with three minutes to go.”

The “punished again” line was a reference to earlier in the broadcast. In the second quarter, Michaels mentioned that Vikings kicker Will Reichard’s only miss this season came when he “hit a camera wire in London.” By the third quarter, the NFL had apparently gotten in Michaels’ ear about it.

“The league wants to take my lunch away because I said before that Reichard’s only miss was hitting a wire in London,” Michaels said. “The league says, ‘No, no, it was an optical illusion.'”

So Michaels had already been corrected once by the NFL during the broadcast. And now, with the game winding down and the Chargers about to kick a field goal that would push the total over, he referenced getting in trouble again.

“Meanwhile, you have a 45-yard attempt, which will draw a little interest… There it is,” Michaels added. “Now you can say that it’s Over. 37-10.”

Michaels has been making veiled gambling references since long before sports betting was legal. He’s talked openly about it over the years, even admitting that he’s known the spread for every game he’s called and understands who’s still watching when games become blowouts. The only time he ever heard from the NFL about his gambling references came back in 1994 during a Monday Night Football broadcast. Since then, the league has mostly looked the other way.

That made sense when gambling was taboo. But now that the NFL has fully embraced sports betting with official partnerships worth over $1 billion, Michaels’ subtle winks don’t carry the same forbidden fruit energy they once did. Sports betting is legal in 38 of 50 states. Gambling sponsorships and ads are everywhere. Lines are prominently displayed on NFL broadcasts. The cat’s not just out of the bag anymore — the cat owns the bag.

Michaels himself has said the fun’s gone out of it a bit. He told The Pat McAfee Show around this time last year that he had more fun “during the time when you weren’t supposed to make any reference to gambling, where I was kind of like the rascal.” Now that everyone’s doing it and people are betting on third-and-four, he’s not breaking any rules. He’s just stating the obvious.

The obvious was a little more obvious on Thursday, though.

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