Drew Brees would like Troy Aikman’s chair, and he has said so out loud, which turns the Monday Night Football job into a campaign before the opening has even been announced. That is the problem. The seat is the biggest booth in sports, and the safest, most polished name on the board is the one most likely to vanish inside it.
Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner reported that Brees told Front Office Sports Today he’d be interested in the gig. Asked whether he has his eye on it, Brees said: “Of course. I mean look, at the end of the day I aspire to be the best at what I’m pursuing.” Aikman is expected to vacate the seat this offseason, though his exit is not confirmed, so Brees is knocking on a door nobody has announced is open. The quote itself could be stitched onto a pillow in a regional bank lobby.
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Treat the whole thing as a run for office and the numbers get strange. Brees has name recognition and a long list of appointments; what he lacks is a win at the polls. He was once seen as NBC’s heir apparent to Cris Collinsworth on Sunday Night Football. Then came the 2022 Raiders-Bengals playoff broadcast, which drew heavy criticism, with critics calling him “beyond vanilla” and “corporate,” and NBC parted ways with him a few months later.
Every stop since has been an appointment, never an election. His comeback started on ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown in mid-2024, Netflix came calling for 2025 with a Christmas Day game lined up, and he began calling Fox games in November 2025, after Mark Sanchez’s altercation with a truck driver in Indianapolis opened the No. 3 job. He now works that team alongside Adam Amin in his first full season at Fox. A candidate who keeps getting hired and never gets chosen should probably ask why before he files for the biggest race.
The campaign itself is the deadpan absurdity: a man whose knock was blandness announcing, in the blandest register available, that he aspires to be the best. Whoever inherits that chair steps into a booth that already generates its own noise, from Aikman’s free agency to his leverage at ESPN. A seat that loud punishes a voice that sounds like a corporate statement.
Consider what the chair actually demands. On Monday night the booth is part of the show, and viewers decide fast whether the voice in their ear has a pulse. A résumé that critics boiled down to “corporate” has already flunked that test once, and every stop since, Countdown and Fox included, has been a chance to retake it somewhere with less at stake. Aspiring to be the best does not change the grade; a sharper opinion on a bad third down would.
The best case for Brees is the one networks keep making for him. Awful Announcing’s writer calls him capable, and capable has kept him employed at ESPN, Netflix and Fox; most broadcasts run on capable. Fine. But the same writer also calls him still pretty boring, and Monday Night Football is the one job where boring has nowhere to hide.
Brees can ask for the seat as often as he likes. Awful Announcing says his booth “just might not be ESPN’s Monday Night Football, even if he’d like it to be.”
