Al Michaels has called a lot of NFL games over his illustrious broadcasting career, but perhaps no matchup quite as frequently as the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants.
Across three different platforms and three different nights of the week, Michaels has been one of the lead voices of professional football. It started all the way back in 1986 with ABC’s Monday Night Football, continued to Sunday Night Football with NBC from from 2006-2021, and now carries on with Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football coverage where he has called games with Kirk Herbstreit for the streamer.
As Michaels prepares to call this week’s Thursday Night Football game, it’s a very familiar matchup featuring the Giants and Cowboys. Just how familiar? As noted by Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk, tonight’s game will be the 20th Cowboys-Giants game in his career across almost four decades of calling games. This includes Michaels’ first game with Monday Night Football and the opening of AT&T Stadium in Dallas. That means roughly every other year, Michaels would have called one of the NFC East divisional showdowns between the rivals.
The milestone is symbolic of a few things. First, Michaels’ incredible longevity in the booth that has spanned a matchup featuring Phil Simms and Danny White under center through Troy Aikman, Tony Romo, Eli Manning, Dak Prescott and Daniel Jones. Second, the obvious draw of the Cowboys as America’s Team, who play in a national or primetime window pretty much every week, and the Giants as the biggest team in America’s biggest market.
But finally, and most importantly for the contemporary season – it’s a big, big deal that Thursday Night Football gets a matchup that has been traditionally saved for the biggest spotlights on the NFL calendar. Thursdays were once the island of misfit toys when it came to NFL schedule makers, but now it’s getting more and more legitimately good and interesting games that are guaranteed viewers. And maybe they have Al Michaels and his repeated requests for better games in part to thank for that.
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