Howard Katz: Dennis Miller tried to stay on ‘Monday Night Football’ with Al Michaels and John Madden

When you look at the state of ESPN, ABC Sports, and the NFL and how intertwined they all are, you have to look at the impact Howard Katz had on getting both of them here.

After beginning his career as a production associate for ABC Sports in the early 1970s, Katz worked his way up in the industry at IMG Media and Ohlmeyer Communications Company, the latter of which was bought by ESPN in 1993. From there, Katz helped shape how the NFL was presented on ABC and ESPN, among many other things. He also helped to launch brands such as ESPN 2, ESPNews, ESPN Radio, and the ESPY Awards. He eventually left the company and joined NFL Films, where he somehow became the maestro of the modern NFL schedule.

Before that, in 1999, he was named president of ABC Sports. At the time, the Monday Night Football booth was Al Michaels and Boomer Esiason. Feeling it needed a refresh, he fired Esiason and created the infamous trio of Al Michaels, Dan Fouts, and comedian Dennis Miller. The Dennis Miller experiment was intended to “make Monday Night Football feel special again,” but it was ultimately remembered as a bust.

In 2002, however, Katz had the opportunity to hire legendary broadcaster John Madden. After several false starts to get him to ABC, he finally signed with the network, where he would be paired with Michaels. However, that meant that both Fouts and Miller were out. According to Katz, however, when he told Miller what was happening, the former SNL castmember tried to convince him to stick around.

Dennis Miller tried to stay on Monday Night Football in a three-man booth with Al Michaels and John Madden, but Howard Katz had to say no.

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“Dennis really tried to talk me into a three-man booth with him staying on,” Katz told Andrew Marchand on The Main Event with Andrew Marchand. “That’s not gonna work with John. I think the world of you. You’ve done great, but it’s gotta be Madden and Michaels, and I can’t do a three-man booth.

“It’s just not gonna work.”

Katz added that Fouts was “great about it” when he heard the news, as he ended up working different broadcasting assignments.

Madden exuded a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky attitude in the booth, but one could imagine that he would not have had much fun trying to compete for oxygen with the chatty, stream-of-consciousness style of Miller. Plus, it was clear at this point that while the comedian and eventual conservative talk show host could hold his own, he wasn’t the right fit for an elite-tier football booth.

“The football thing was fun for me. I was in the middle of a maelstrom, and I just decided not to pay attention to it because, for me, getting hired was a freakish act of nature. I had never gone to a football game,” Miller said later during an appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show. “I remember the day I heard that John Madden had quit Fox (and) I remember calling Dan Fouts that afternoon and saying, ‘Get ready, babe, we’re getting whacked.’ … I don’t have any hard feelings.”