Troy Aikman Questions Quality Of NFL Play: How’s This Professional?

The SI Media Podcast this week included ESPN’s Troy Aikman, who again bemoaned the level of play in the NFL this year.

During one of his press conferences earlier this season, Tom Brady was questioned about parity in the NFL. The eventual Hall of Famer was blunt about what he believed parity to actually entail.

According to what I watch, there is a lot of awful football, Brady claimed. “I watch a lot of lousy football, a lot of football of poor quality,” the speaker said.

Troy Aikman Questions Quality Of NFL Play: How’s This Professional?

Aikamn initiated the conversation by inquiring of the Monday Night Football analyst whether the NFL might ever hold future AFC and NFC championship games at neutral locations. The NFL may be testing the waters with this year’s AFC title game, which will be played at a neutral site if it involves the Bills, Chiefs, or Bengals, Peter King said earlier this week on Chris Russo’s SiriusXM radio show.

“I wouldn’t like that,” said Aikman, “and there’s this side of me that thinks, well, I’m more of a traditionalist, but there is the side of me that thinks, gosh, if everybody had thought like I thought we’d still be playing a 12-game schedule and things would look a lot different, but I think we have to be really, really careful as a league.

“I will say, the NFL, they’re really good at making a lot of money. They’re really good at that. And I don’t begrudge them for that. I say good for them and the marketing of the NFL. And we watch the popularity of the sport and out of the top 100 shows, 80 something of them were NFL games this year. I love all that.”

“I just would like to see more emphasis on improving the product on the field. I’d like to see that there’s some interest in that as well. It seems like all these decisions are made to increase revenue, which is great, but then it’s less time on the field for players, and then it’s less time here, and the product begins to erode a little bit, and and I think we’ve got to be really, really careful about that and I’ve been saying that for a while.”

When asked to elaborate on the product eroding, Aikman said, “I think it’s the fundamentals of the sport. Football is the only sport that you can’t practice the way that you play it. All the other sports get to go practice and then go and play. In football you don’t and so we see the fundamentals of tackling aren’t what they once were.”

https://twitter.com/gsiller23/status/1613021966092337157?s=20&t=aw1-_NwzxT8Bp_bKMpLk_gnbsp;

Aikman added, “There were games that we watched, and I won’t say what network most of them were on, and I had to ask myself, ‘Is this professional football?’ There was some bad bad football being played, and that’s not good!

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Aikman was talking about Thursday Night Football and Amazon Prime. I questioned Aikman about whether he was relieved that he didn’t end up at Amazon considering how poorly the TNF schedule ended out, since it had seemed for a long that he would join Amazon to call TNF before joining ESPN.

We also talked about Aikman’s first season as the voice of Monday Night Football, his experience during Damar Hamlin’s medical emergency while in the stadium and on the air, his thoughts on this weekend’s wild-card games, why Tom Brady is still competing at a high level at age 45, and much more during the podcast.

 

 

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