Troy Aikman has clarified remarks about not getting assigned to this month’s Wild Card game between the 49ers and Cowboys: he wasn’t upset, just confused.
While calling the Buccaneers’ first-round blowout against the Eagles with Joe Buck on Fox, Buck mentioned that the Niners-Cowboys game was on deck at CBS.
“It’s going to be a great game,” Aikman said at the time. “I think there’s a lot of people who that’d like to be calling that game.”
The remark naturally inspired countless jokes on social media, but on Tuesday, Aikman addressed the now-viral comments on Ryen Russillo’s podcast.
“There were some that said I’d rather be doing that game than the game I was doing,” Aikman said. “That wasn’t my point at all. I’m thrilled to be doing any game. Joe said that would be an amazing game. Yeah, I would have loved to be calling that game. It’s an amazing ball game.
“But that didn’t mean I would love to be calling it over the game I was calling, or I was upset about it. I was confused, quite honestly. When it first came out, I thought there was a chance we would be calling that game, and that if we weren’t that meant it would be on ESPN or NBC. We have that happen a lot … But I was confused when an NFC matchup went to a network that covers the AFC with CBS. I didn’t understand that; I still don’t really understand that.”
Fox has traditionally had NFC rights, meaning it’s aired many of the big Cowboys games over the last 30 years. CBS, on the other hand, has mostly had AFC rights. The network got the 49ers-Cowboys game as a result of the expanded NFL playoffs that began last season, which saw CBS and NBC fork over about $70 million apiece for each network to get an extra Wild Card playoff game.
As for the 49ers-Cowboys game, San Francisco got the win in the game’s final seconds and is now slated to face Los Angeles in Sunday’s NFC Championship.