Al Michaels will call the Buffalo Bills’ home opener against the Detroit Lions on Sept. 17, and it will be the 10th time he has handled the first regular-season game from a new stadium. At 81, he says he is not looking for a retirement tour, even as this broadcast lands like a career marker that few announcers have reached.
“Don’t need one,” Michaels said when asked about a retirement tour. “Don’t want one.” He added, “I should bring my own scissors with me to cut the ribbon.” The game is a first for him in another sense too: it will be the first stadium inauguration he has called with Amazon after years of working Monday Night Football for ABC and Sunday Night Football for NBC.
That matters because Michaels has spent much of his career attached to the biggest NFL stages, and the opening of a stadium has become one of the sport’s more distinctive assignments. His first came on Sept. 10, 2001, when the Denver Broncos hosted the Giants. Since then, he has also worked openers at AT&T Stadium and at SoFi Stadium, where the pandemic left the building without a crowd.
For Michaels, the appeal is still in the walk-in. He said he gets a charge out of arriving at the stadium because the energy from fans takes him back to walking to Ebbets Field for Dodgers games as a child. He and Kirk Herbstreit were given a tour of the new Highmark Stadium the day before the game, and Michaels said he was not expecting booth problems or sightline issues despite preseason attention on obstructed seats.
The broader picture is a little more complicated than a neat milestone. Michaels says he does not want a retirement sendoff, yet the Sept. 17 game will still be his 10th stadium opener, and the one that turns a long run into a visible number. He is entering his fifth season calling TNF alongside Herbstreit, and he said the quality of Amazon’s games has improved year after year. “When we started out, the schedule was OK. And now the schedule was excellent,” he said. “You never know how they’re going to turn out, obviously, but when you look at our schedule … you can’t ask for much more than that.”
He said the league wanted his crew to unveil stadiums under the bright lights, and that the assignment still carries pride. “And this is going to be a lot of fun on Thursday night for me,” Michaels said. What comes after Sept. 17 is less clear: he has not said the Bills-Lions game will be the last stadium first of his career, only that he is not interested in turning it into a farewell lap.
