Broadcast Legend Al Michaels Tells a Four-Minute 'Bedtime Story' on Live TV: Errors Fuel Retirement Calls as Other Fans Say It Beat the Game
M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, hosted Thursday Night Football on the night of November 5, with the Jacksonville Jaguars beating the Baltimore Ravens 33-10 on the road. The game itself was one-sided, and what spread across social media afterward was a detour by 81-year-old legendary play-by-play announcer Al Michaels in the Prime Video booth: in the fourth quarter he told a story lasting more than four minutes, and as he wrapped it up he laughed and called it his "bedtime story."
According to the broadcast clip posted by Awful Announcing, Jacksonville led 23-3 early in the fourth quarter when Michaels told color commentator Kirk Herbstreit: "I've got a good bedtime story coming up for you. Everybody likes a bedtime story, a good one." He then told how Tom Coughlin became the Jaguars' first head coach: Coughlin, then coaching Boston College, got a message he could not place and thought a local dealer was trying to sell him a Jaguar car, only to learn on calling back that it was Jaguars chief operating officer David Seldin. When Seldin said five candidates were in mind, Coughlin declined; when the list was down to two, he agreed to interview, became the team's first head coach, and took Jacksonville to the AFC Championship Game in the 1996 season. The story was interrupted for about 10 seconds by an interception by Jaguars defensive back Jourdan Lewis, after which Michaels picked the thread back up and finished: "Anyway, there's your bedtime story. Interrupted by an interception, but apart from that." As the broadcast went to a break, the production played "Ramblin' Man" by the Allman Brothers Band.
The detour was not Michaels' only error of the night. On Jacksonville's first possession he gave quarterback Trevor Lawrence's draft year as 2001; the correct year is 2021. talkSPORT also noted that he at one point implied Ravens kicker Jake Moody had played for the Green Bay Packers in 2025, which Moody never did. Pro Football Network noted that in Week 7 he had also referred to the Chicago Bears' and New England Patriots' quarterbacks as being from the "class of 2014." Awful Announcing's X post of the "bedtime story" clip on November 6 spread quickly, and talkSPORT, Yardbarker, Total Pro Sports and other sports outlets followed with reports.
Online reaction split in two. One side was unsparing: one fan wrote, "Dude needs to retire. So incredibly boring," and radio host Kyle Madson wrote that Michaels has been "so over" every game he has broadcast since 2018. The other side found the moment funny and human: one fan said his annoyance at the interception interrupting the story was hilarious and "peak Al Michaels"; another said the story "was more interesting than the game, honestly"; and another joked, "I turned it off. Now I wish I hadn't, because I wanna hear a bedtime story."
Michaels was born on November 12, 1944, and turns 82 next week. He was the broadcast voice of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice," when the U.S. men's hockey team beat the Soviet Union; he was ABC's lead Monday Night Football announcer from 1986 to 2005 and NBC's Sunday Night Football announcer from 2006 to 2021, before joining Prime Video's Thursday Night Football in 2022, where this is his fifth season. He has called 11 Super Bowls and more than 770 NFL prime-time games. According to Pro Football Network, he said on The Dan Patrick Show in October that he would know when it was time to retire, or his employers would tell him. As of publication, neither Michaels nor Prime Video had publicly responded to the clip.
Source: Awful Announcing's X post
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 阿尔·迈克尔斯本人资料图（Keith Allison摄于2017年，CC BY-SA 2.0，经Wikimedia Commons），非本次事件现场图
