Thursday’s Raiders-Broncos game admittedly didn’t give Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit a lot to work with.
Since TNF‘s inception on Amazon’s Prime Video, the duo has had to work increasingly hard to keep their audience engaged. The 80-year-old Michaels refuses to sell NFL fans on “crap,” and while that’s admirable, it’s still the job of the announcing crew to prevent a bad game from becoming worse.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in Denver.
As the Broncos clung to a 10-7 lead in the fourth quarter, Pete Carroll made the questionable decision to allow an injured Geno Smith to play in obvious discomfort. The veteran quarterback was dealing with a quad contusion and was visibly hobbled and clearly compromised.
But instead of taking Carroll — or Smith, for that matter — to task as he did Carson Wentz, Herbstreit did little to acknowledge the situation. In fact, he and Michaels did basically nothing to address an obvious late hit on Smith that only made matters worse.
Kirk Herbstreit and Al Michaels completely whiffed on this late hit on Geno Smith.
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Smith had let go of the ball, and two or three Mississippis went by before Zach Allen shed a block and wrapped up the veteran quarterback by his legs and took him to the ground.
In a league that’s become so hellbent on protecting its QBs — whether it be Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes — this was the most obvious roughing the passer penalty we’ve seen in weeks, and the officials missed it. As did Herbstreit and Michaels.
“He got hit right after he threw that football, was brought down by 99, Zach Allen,” said Herbstreit.
ESPN’s No. 1 college football voice opined that Allen was “just finishing the play” before moving on to another thought. Perhaps he’s chosen to bite his tongue after the Carson Wentz diatribe, where he lectured an injured quarterback about showing emotion, only for it to be revealed that Wentz had been playing with a dislocated shoulder, torn labrum, and fractured socket. But after his rants about Tennessee fans and SEC bias, we’d have to imagine this was a straight-up miss.
Fine, misses happen. They’re allowed to happen, and we at Awful Announcing will call them out from time to time. But this was a game that had few — if any — memorable moments besides a blocked punt. This was Herbstreit’s opportunity to do what Amazon pays him to do: provide meaningful analysis when the game needs it most. Instead, he chose to check down and move on to the next play, basically acknowledging that a dangerous, late hit on an already-injured quarterback never even happened.
The job of the color commentator isn’t just to describe what happens. It’s to provide context, perspective, and — when necessary — to call out what’s wrong. Herbstreit’s response to the late hit — or lack thereof — swung the pendulum way too far in the other direction.
That’s the problem with overcorrecting. Herbstreit went from being too critical of an injured Wentz to being too passive about an endangered Smith. The job isn’t to pick a side; it’s to call what you see. And what everyone watching saw was a quarterback who shouldn’t have been out there taking hits he couldn’t avoid from a rusher who had plenty of time to pull up.