Rich Eisen built a second career on NFL Network almost by accident, stepping into the play-by-play chair years after he’d already made his name as a host. It appears that part of his career is now over, as he told Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina that he no longer expects to call games.
“No, it is not,” Eisen said when Traina asked if calling extra games for NFL Network was still part of his résumé. “I believe I am done.”
Eisen started calling NFL Network’s international slate in 2018, gradually building a rapport with analyst Kurt Warner as the network leaned on the duo year after year for its overseas package. Eisen has talked before about the specific pressure of the job, telling Richard Deitsch — then with The Athletic – that he stayed conscious of critics who thought he “should just stick to hosting,” even as he pushed to get better at it. That criticism never fully let up, as The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand previously said that Eisen “is just not a play-by-player” and argued he called games “the way he thinks you’re supposed to call a game instead of being instinctive, which comes from reps and reps.”
Eisen’s exit from the booth comes as ESPN has taken over production decisions for NFL Network following its acquisition of NFL Media earlier this year, a deal that also killed off the infamous Monday Night Football doubleheader. NFL broadcast planner Mike North later admitted the doubleheader format “probably wasn’t a good use of an NFL asset,” and the four games ESPN handed back to the league as part of the deal ended up scattered across Fox, NBC, and Netflix rather than staying on ESPN’s own air. Eisen’s international package fell under that same reshuffling, and reporting earlier this year had already suggested he wouldn’t keep the job once ESPN took over. Dave Pasch signed an extension with ESPN this summer that put him in line for that same international slate, leaving his longtime radio role with the Arizona Cardinals to take it.
In his conversation with Traina on the latest episode of the SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast, Eisen described play-by-play as fundamentally at odds with the instincts that have defined the rest of his career.
“I enjoyed doing it a lot, man. I enjoyed doing it a lot. But it’s so counter to what I normally do,” Eisen said. “Sitting in this chair on this set, three-hour radio TV simulcast game day morning on Sunday morning, if there’s dead air, if there’s blank space, if there’s no talking, my first thought is to jump in and fill the void. It’s the exact opposite when you’re calling a game. Your job is to shut the f up after the big moment happens.”
He also pointed to a learning curve that took years to work through, tied to a decision he made early on not to call games off a broadcast monitor at the stadium.
“To be as good as you want to be at that, you’ve got to do it a lot,” Eisen said. “When I first started doing it for NFL Network, it was like, I don’t want to be one of those announcers who calls the game off a monitor, so I want to look at the field. But looking at it, it was like seeing it through a straw. By last year, I was seeing the whole field.”
But just as Eisen was starting to see the whole field, his play-by-play opportunities dried up on both fronts. YouTube, where he and Warner called an exclusive game last season, won’t have any NFL games this year after walking away from a five-game package when the league moved to split games between the Google-owned online video-sharing platform and Netflix. And while he’s no longer in line for NFL Network’s international slate, he’ll continue to host NFL GameDay Morning on Sunday mornings.