Al Michaels: Prime Video was ‘stunned’ when NFL gave them Packers-Bears Wild Card game

Al Michaels is pretty happy with the Thursday Night Football schedule this year.

The legendary announcer has been the voice of TNF since Amazon’s Prime Video took over the weekly staple, and he’s been very upfront about the quality of the games he’s gotten to call in that time.

The 81-year-old, who infamously used to compare some of the games on Prime’s TNF slate to selling a used car (he even cited a “20-year-old Mazda” once), once said that Amazon’s game schedule “was a little leaky,” and that he’d had to call a “farcical” game or two. However, the NFL started doing Prime some solids the last few seasons, and Michaels has been quick to applaud the quality of games on his calendar. Even at his age, the broadcaster sussed out that the league was well aware of the quickly growing value of streaming service audiences.

The NFL released its 2026 schedule this past week, and the TNF slate is once again very strong, featuring Lions-Bills, Seahawks-Broncos, Patriots-Bears, and Chiefs-Rams, as well as several divisional matchups.

Michaels expressed his appreciation for the quality of the games during an appearance on the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast.

“The league’s been very, very good to us as the years have progressed here,” Michaels told Deitsch. “I mean, the first year, getting started, the games weren’t particularly compelling. But the schedule now has gotten better and better and better.”

Michael then shared that not only does it feel like the league is giving Prime Video more consistent matchups, but it also sees them as a critical media partner, sharing an example from last year’s Wild Card Round as proof.

“There was a seminal moment last year in terms of how the league felt about Prime, when there were six Wild Card games at the end of the season, and they didn’t apportion them until the final whistle on Sunday,” he said. “Our whole group gathered, and we said, you know what, they’ll probably give us the third or fourth best game.

“We knew the best game, number one, Green Bay-Chicago, we weren’t going to get it. San Francisco-Philadelphia, doubtful. So we would probably wind up with the— I think Jacksonville played Buffalo, the Rams were playing Carolina. I can’t remember what the other game was, but we were stunned when they gave us Green Bay-Chicago.

“I think I kidded [Fox Sports CEO] Eric Shanks about it, too. I said, ‘You guys were stunned over at Fox.’ He said, ‘We were.’ I said, ‘You can’t do every Green Bay-Chicago game, you know.’ And then we did 32 million people in the game, it was phenomenal.”

Indeed, at the time, the first-round matchup between the Packers and Bears was expected to air on Sunday, either in the Fox 4:30 p.m. slot or on Sunday Night Football on NBC. Instead, it went to Prime while Fox got the San Francisco 49ers-Philadelphia Eagles game, and NBC got the Los Angeles Chargers-New England Patriots game.

Jeff Agrest of the Chicago Sun-Times reported at the time that every NFL playoff broadcasting partner wanted that game, but the NFL “chose to lean into its burgeoning relationship with Prime Video’s owner, Amazon,” and “wants streaming to be a significant part of its media rights.” He added that the NFL also saw putting the game on Prime as a chance to attract a younger audience. 

Between that and many of the decisions that went into the revised media rights heading into the 2026 season, it’s pretty clear just how much the NFL is prioritizing its relationships with streaming partners like Prime. That’s all good news for Michaels, who always lets you know where he stands on the quality of the games he’s calling.