One of the strangest broadcast stories of recent years saw Jason Witten leave ESPN Monday night football booth after just a year in February 2019, doing so to return to the Dallas Cowboys as a player. In 2019, he started all 16 games for the Cowboys and recorded 63 receptions for 529 yards and four touchdowns. Witten then joined the Las Vegas Raiders last fall and played all 16 games for them (he was seen above during a game in December against the Miami Dolphins), but he only started with seven, and made just 13 receptions for 69 yards and two touchdowns. According to Todd Archer of ESPN, Witten (who will turn 39 in May) is now retiring again:
Jason Witten told ESPN that he is retiring from the NFL after a 17-year career. He plans to sign a one-day contract and retire as a member of the Dallas Cowboys in March, when his contract with the Las Vegas Raiders expires in March. He ends his career with 1,228 receptions, 13,046 yards, 74 touchdowns and 271 games played, which are the maximum in NFL history by a tight end.
So, can Witten return to the transmission booth? Well, your time at MNF has received a lot of criticism. But after returning to the NFL, he told Dan Patrick that he didn’t care much about the reaction and that he would have returned to play even if his comment had been better received:
“I think I would still be playing. And this is not a criticism, I just felt that there was a strong desire and fire that I still had to go to play. Did I make the right decision, the wrong decision? If I didn’t have the opportunity to play again, you could say that I was wrong. But I am better not only as a player, but also as a person through that experience. You go through some adversities, you get humiliated and you survive that year. I am grateful for that. “
… ”I don’t know if you are more and more alive than when you are playing the game you love, you feel you can play at the level you expect to play. It was always kind of pulling me. We were lucky enough to call up the Chiefs-Rams game that should have been in Mexico City last year, the two teams were unbeaten, famous players in abundance, young coach against the former coach. And it was a shootout, it was the game with the highest score of the season. And you finish the game, and I didn’t play, I didn’t help the team to win. We didn’t mess up the transmission too much. “
“I wanted this feeling, I wanted to be part of a team, I wanted to go out and play and experience where winning and losing is important … I am grateful to have this opportunity again, and I am very happy to know that I can still play. So yes, I think I would have come back and played, for sure. “
And he told Ryen Russillo that the criticisms didn’t bother him much:
“I checked my messages and found out that I was sick or someone died in my family. ‘Hey, praying for you’, ‘Keep your head up!’ I’m like, my God, it wasn’t too bad! I said ‘get a rabbit out of his head’ instead of ‘get the rabbit out of a hat’! You guys knew what I meant, right? I blew it, but it wasn’t the end of the world in my opinion. “
So, at least from Witten’s public comments, the return to the NFL was not to leave the broadcast, but to play again. And if he was okay with the criticism he received for his past mistakes, he might be willing to put himself up to more if he went back to broadcasting. And it is very likely that he would be better placed as a studio analyst or regional game analyst to begin with, instead of getting his first job as a game analyst as part of an entirely new booth in prime time games broadcast on television. national. (It should be emphasized that a large part of the problems at the MNF booth were not necessarily about Witten, Joe Tessitore or Booger McFarland, but about the incredibly difficult situation they were placed in; having two people making their debut as a game analyst from the NFL The MNF would be difficult in the first place, and ESPN made it much worse with the 2.5-man stand thanks to the “Boogermobile”.)
However, it is worth asking if Witten is really well regarded by anyone in the broadcasting world to have another chance to comment on NFL TV (if he did decide to proceed). Despite his achievements in the field, he was not necessarily an obvious hire, even in the first place, and hiring him now would appear to have some potential impact due to his difficulties with the MNF. And ESPN, the place that employs most NFL studio analysts, may also not be so eager to bring you in, since he left them in the middle of the contract to return to the NFL (and did so at the end of the season, creating stand challenges for them, and they did so after they had spent a good part of the off-season promoting it). It is certainly possible that Witten will get another kick in the broadcast if he wants to (and it is not yet clear if he wants it), but it is not a certain thing. So we will see what Witten’s second retirement, if anything, means to the broadcasting world.
[ESPN; photo from Mark J. Rebilas/USA Today Sports]