{"id":894008,"date":"2026-05-17T20:30:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T20:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/894008\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T20:30:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T20:30:16","slug":"al-michaels-was-stunned-by-nfl-playoff-schedule-decision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/894008\/","title":{"rendered":"Al Michaels Was ‘Stunned’ By NFL Playoff Schedule Decision"},"content":{"rendered":"

Legendary NFL<\/a> announcer Al Michaels doesn’t get surprised by the league’s scheduling decisions very often. But he was during the playoffs.<\/p>\n

Michaels, the longtime voice of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” has been with Amazon Prime for the past couple of seasons. Michaels calls the Thursday Night Football games with his coworker, Kirk Herbstreit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The longtime NFL announcer and the longtime college football<\/a> star got a surprise playoff game in January. Meanwhile, he was happy with their schedule for 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe league\u2019s been very, very good to us as the years have progressed here,\u201d Michaels told Richard Deitsch. \u201cI mean, the first year, getting started, the games weren\u2019t particularly compelling. But the schedule now has gotten better and better and better.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DecDec 21, 2023; Inglewood, California, USA; Thursday Night Football Amazon Prime play-by-play announcer Al Michaels during the game between the Los Angeles Rams<\/a> and the New Orleans Saints<\/a> at SoFi Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports\u00a9 Kirby Lee-Imagn Images&period;<\/p>\n

Last year, Amazon Prime got the big Packers<\/a> vs. Bears Wild Card playoff game. That’s something that “stunned” Michaels.<\/p>\n

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Michaels couldn’t believe that they landed that one.<\/p>\n

Amazon Prime announcer stunned by the decision<\/p>\n

He couldn’t believe it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a seminal moment last year in terms of how the league felt about Prime, when there were six Wild Card games at the end of the season, and they didn\u2019t apportion them until the final whistle on Sunday,\u201d he said. \u201cOur whole group gathered, and we said, you know what, they\u2019ll probably give us the third or fourth best game.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe knew the best game, number one, Green Bay-Chicago, we weren\u2019t going to get it. San Francisco-Philadelphia, doubtful. So we would probably wind up with the\u2014 I think Jacksonville<\/a> played Buffalo, the Rams were playing Carolina. I can\u2019t remember what the other game was, but we were stunned when they gave us Green Bay-Chicago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I kidded [Fox Sports CEO] Eric Shanks about it, too. I said, \u2018You guys were stunned over at Fox.\u2019 He said, \u2018We were.\u2019 I said, \u2018You can\u2019t do every Green Bay-Chicago game, you know.\u2019 And then we did 32 million people in the game, it was phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NFL has been putting more and more big games on Amazon Prime – and clearly, Michaels is a fan.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by The Spun<\/a> on May 17, 2026, where it first appeared in the NFL<\/a> section. Add The Spun as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Legendary NFL announcer Al Michaels doesn’t get surprised by the league’s scheduling decisions very often. But he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894009,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[17992,1594,7,212,58,55,6,84,428,4032],"class_list":["post-894008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl-playoffs","tag-al-michaels","tag-amazon-prime","tag-football","tag-jacksonville","tag-los-angeles-rams","tag-new-orleans-saints","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-playoffs","tag-packers","tag-sunday-night-football"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116591815836617411","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}