Joe Theismann is a bitter man. Who wouldn’t be after being fired by ESPN for really no reason at all. But when you go over the unceremonial firings, I can go back to Fred “The Hammer” Williamson who was fired back in 1974 after two pre-season games to be replaced by Alex Karras. Producer Terry O’Neill was also fired from the show and there was the revolving carousel of announcers in the the late 1990’s – early 2000’s.
Theismann is now speaking out in a new interview with the Boston Metro newspapers. His comments include:
I’m not happy with what happened. When you sit down in a meeting and they tell you that you’ve had your best year ever, and the ratings have gone up 50 percent and the executives don’t even talk to my boss and tell me that they didn’t like the fact that I talked about football, you have a little trouble trying to process how you could have done better. For Mike [Tirico] and Tony [Kornheiser] and Ron, it’ll be a learning process again, because Ron hasn’t done television. Tony is extremely neurotic. And I think Mike really settled in. I felt like the last six games we really settled in as a real solid team, all of us. And now, they’ll have to re-create that chemistry again.
It’s not known where Theismann will work because he’s still under contract to ESPN. Thanks to Sports by Brooks for the link.
