Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Tony Romo, these are names we’ve heard as potential analysts for Monday Night Football in recent years. And they make sense, because they played in the NFL, they’re experts in the sport. Charles Barkley on Monday Night Football? That doesn’t make sense.
Barkley is synonymous with the NBA. He was a hall-of-fame player and now he’s a hall-of-fame analyst. His analysis is a stretch for the NCAA Tournament, but at least it’s basketball, a sport he knows.
Joining Hank Azaria’s The Jim Brockmire Podcast as part of Meadowlark Media, Barkley casually mentioned he was once offered the Monday Night Football gig. It came up during an attempt to disparage people’s incessant need to use Twitter as a way of commenting on everything. Recognizing his lane, the hall-of-fame power forward said he knew he wasn’t a fit for the job and didn’t want to pretend to be an expert the way people on Twitter do.
“These guys…they feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening in the world,” Barkley said of the Twittersphere. “I only comment on basketball. Like, they offered me Monday Night Football, I said, I like football, but I ain’t going to be one of these jackasses to get on TV and act like he knows about football.”
We have no idea when Barkley was offered a Monday Night Football opportunity, or how serious the idea was. But if the offer was indeed made, it likely came before Monday Night Football’s failed experiment with an analyst who was put on TV to act like he knows about football in Dennis Miller. Miller was hired for Monday Night Football in June 2000, around the same time Barkley joined TNT.
Are we sure the basketball analyst didn’t just overhear someone from ESPN say they’re looking for football’s version of Charles Barkley? Magnetizing, brash, polarizing, funny, Barkley has plenty of characteristics ESPN would look for in an NFL analyst, except for his lack of football expertise. But it’s fair to assume ESPN could have been in search of the football version of Charles Barkley.