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Michael Irvin is one of the NFL's all-time greats. The Cowboys legend was a magnetic figure during the 1990s on a Dallas team that took the NFL by storm. He took his electric personality and years of football knowledge to NFL Network and has been a mainstay on the network's pre-game coverage during the NFL season. Unfortunately, Irvin's time at NFL Network is coming to an end.
According to the New York Post, NFL Network will not renew Michael Irvin's contract. The league-owned channel has undergone several rounds of cost-cutting moves in the last year, with the most recent impacting Irvin.
Irvin has been an analyst at NFL Network since 2009 and played a major role in GameDay Morning, the Sunday morning football pregame show.
Irvin was a contributor on Undisputed with Skip Bayless on FS1 in 2023 and he will reportedly continue in that role. Perhaps Fox Sports could expand Irvin's presence on pre-show programs and give him a similar role to what he had on NFL Network.
As a player, Michael Irvin was a three-time Super Bowl champion with the Dallas Cowboys. In his 159-game career, Irvin logged 750 receptions for 11,904 receiving yards and eclipsed 100 yards in a game 47 times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2007. Irvin was also named a member of the NFL's All-Decade Team of the 1990s.
Other changes coming to NFL Network include an end to NFL Total Access
The New York Post also confirmed that NFL Total Access program will air its final show later this month. NFL Total Access is a nightly news program and has been on the network since 2003.
It was taken off the air for a week this past March
A.J. Perez from Front Office Sports reported today that NFL Network had another round of layoffs this week and that the network will be airing “an altered programming schedule” for the 2024 NFL season.
According to a spokesperson from the network, the cuts were made to “ensure the continued strength of our game and the business.”
Those feel like hollow words. The NFL is one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the world and continues to grow year after year. Aside from one down COVID season, the NFL continues to see revenue and attendance increases. Simply put, the NFL is stronger than ever.
There are even more changes happening within the NFL media landscape. Earlier in 2024, Andrew Marchand reported that the NFL and ESPN were in talks that would see the NFL taking an equity stake in ESPN. The same report said that NFL Network programming and NFL.com would transition to being under ESPN's production umbrella. It is not clear how that would change the day-to-day operations at NFL Network or NFL.com, nor who it would affect.
NFL Network will still have Good Morning Football, its most popular program. The program's studio will be moving from New Jersey to Los Angeles later this year, which is a good sign of long-term investment in the show.
One bit of positive news out of NFL Network was the re-signing of NFL insider Ian Rapaport a week before the 2024 NFL Draft.
