Thursday’s Week 2 opening tilt between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings will mark the 2023 season’s inaugural edition of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video.
This means it’s the first time this season that NFL fans will welcome the commentary team of Kirk Herbstreit and Al Michaels into their home via a television screen.
Michaels’ voice has become synonymous with primetime NFL football during his nearly 60-year career in broadcasting. Herbstreit, on the other hand, only very recently began his foray into NFL coverage.
But he’s been a prominent name in football circles for quite some time. And his efforts in the broadcast realm have helped him to amass a small fortune.
What Is Kirk Herbstreit’s Net Worth?
The exact figures vary depending on your source, but Herbstreit is almost unanimously named among the highest-paid broadcasters in sports. This Bleacher Report article from July of last year named Herbstreit one of the seven most profitable analysts in the business today.
GAMEDAY FROM TUSCALOOSA STARTS NOW 👏 @KirkHerbstreit
Wait for Coach at the end 🧡 pic.twitter.com/ZsRVsZOezy
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) September 9, 2023
B/R estimates Herbstreit earns as much as $16 million annually between his Thursday Night gig with Amazon and the work he does on ABC’s College Gameday. It’s his work with the latter that’s helped accelerate Herbstreit’s rise to prominence.
Herbstreit, a four-year letter-winner at quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes from 1989-93, joined the Gameday crew in 1996. After a decade of cutting his teeth there, Herbstreit added lead game analyst duties for ABC/ESPN, regularly calling the highest-profile game of the week.
The 54-year-old Herbstreit has built up a considerable net worth during almost three decades spent in broadcasting. He’s worth around $12 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
That’s a figure you can expect to grow substantially so long as Herbstreit continues pulling double (technically, triple) duty between Amazon and ABC every football season. Herbstreit acknowledged in a recent interview with The New York Post that it was challenging at times last season.
“Last year, I know I was taking on something that was kind of unprecedented, doing an NFL game on a Thursday and then doing a three-hour ‘College GameDay’ studio show at a national level, and then calling a Saturday night game. There’s a lot of preparation.”
Herbstreit withstood the rigors of his multiple roles a season ago, but one could see where it would get taxing.
There’s traveling, for one. Gameday is notoriously all over the map. Thursday Night Football, similarly, doesn’t have a main studio set or static location.
Al Michaels: "Sometimes a game can be… so bad, it's almost good. You know what I'm saying?"
Kirk Herbstreit: "No! I'm not feeling that just yet over here!"
This was followed by a Colts pass for -5 yards, and then another Matt Ryan interception. 🏈😂 #TNF pic.twitter.com/PBROC4yF3G
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 7, 2022
And then there’s the prep work Herbstreit mentioned. Not only does he need to familiarize himself with the games and players he’s covering directly. He needs a base-level knowledge of all teams in both the NCAA and NFL.
The notorious workaholic has proven to be up to the task, but he revealed that he plans on trying to slow down and enjoy the fruits of his labor a little more in year two with Amazon.
MORE: PFN Life — Off-the-Field Content
“The execution of the actual job and those three gigs for me is fun if I’ve done my prep, and I’ve built my entire career on being prepared, and having all the answers, and what I learned is I didn’t get to go to dinner with Al, Kaylee [Hartung] and our entire crew enough,” Herbstreit continued.
“Or just go get a workout. I cannot tell you how much I prepared because I didn’t want to let anyone down, including myself.”