Jon Gruden and Sean McDonough made it through two seasons as broadcast partners on Monday Night Football, a tenure that Mcdonough reflected on during this week’s SI Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina.
“It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I got the chance to do it,” McDonough said on the show. “Do I think we were bad? No, I thought it was fine. But it could’ve been great in my opinion, and it wasn’t.”
McDonough dove deeper into the “awkward” dynamic between him and Gruden, who were paired together before the 2016 season when Mike Tirico left ESPN for NBC.
“You’re standing there next to somebody wondering, ‘If I ask him a question about this, is he gonna answer it or is he gonna be annoyed that I asked him?’” McDonough said. “So it was uncomfortable. … The part of it that bothered me was the narrative of some people in your line of work, ‘Oh, well that was a little too big for McDonough.’ I did the World Series when I was 30. I don’t think anybody thought I was nervous or out of place.”
The two went their separate ways following the 2017 season when Gruden returned to coaching as the head man for the Las Vegas Raiders, and McDonough slid back into his role as a lead broadcaster on ESPN’s college football team. McDonough pointed out to Traina that production tended to favor Gruden’s strengths over more conversational strategies.
“I think, to be totally candid, Jon Gruden enjoyed the X-and-O part of it,” McDonough said. “He loved the telestrator. He told me when I first got the job, ‘I don’t like stories.’ So he didn’t want the stories, and he didn’t want to engage in conversation. There were times when I would ask him a question or make a point, and he didn’t respond, and I think it was just because he was so focused on, ‘I’m gonna dive into this play,’ and he just didn’t want to do it… Jon’s the analyst. TV is an analyst-driven medium. It was his strength. They played to his strength. It made sense. It just didn’t match with what I was there to do.”
