Joe Buck may have a new partner in the Monday Night Football booth next season, but ESPN’s potential choice is already dividing NFL fans. With Troy Aikman’s future at the network increasingly uncertain, Fox analyst Greg Olsen has emerged as the favorite to take over.

But would replacing a Hall of Famer with Olsen make ESPN’s top broadcast team better or worse? While some fans are excited about the possibility, others believe the network would be making a major mistake in letting Aikman walk.

Why Greg Olsen Is Seen as the Favorite to Replace Troy Aikman

Olsen, Fox’s No. 2 game analyst, is “widely considered by people inside the sports media industry to be the favorite to replace Aikman,” according to Andrew Marchand’s report in The Athletic.

Marchand also reported that ESPN could also try to convince Peyton or Eli Manning, or Travis or Jason Kelce, or hold out the possibility of using Kirk Herbstreit, who just re-signed an NFL deal with Prime Video.

The report mentioned that Olsen has met ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro and content president Burke Magnus only once, shaking their hands in passing when he stopped by the network’s luxury box at halftime of last season’s College Football Playoff championship between his alma mater, Miami, and Buck’s Indiana.

So why Olsen? He called Super Bowl 57 and, over two seasons alongside Kevin Burkhardt, won a Sports Emmy. He is now a three-time Sports Emmy winner. After Tom Brady displaced him from Fox’s top NFL booth, Olsen moved to the No. 2 team with Joe Davis and won the 2026 Sports Emmy for Outstanding Event Analyst over a field that included Brady.

Marchand’s report also noted that Olsen has been eager to get back to a network’s top booth.

The Athletic’s report described the current ESPN MNF partnership as one that has frayed in public. Buck agreed to a new six-year, $108 million deal with ESPN, and neither he nor the network told Aikman. Aikman took that as a betrayal, while Buck felt it mirrored how Aikman had handled his own business during their run together.

According to The Athletic, ESPN has taken Buck’s side, though the plan is still for Aikman and Buck to finish the season together, ending with ESPN’s first Super Bowl broadcast on Feb. 14.

Fans Disagree Whether Olsen Would Be an Upgrade on Troy Aikman

Olsen’s supporters didn’t need much convincing. One fan welcomed the news: “Good. Greg Olsen is the best in the game.”

Another fan wrote: “He’s a great analyst not like captain obvious.”

Another fan pointed back to the Fox shuffle that cost Olsen his top job: “He’s great, Brady is turning out good, but wasn’t at Olsen’s level when he replaced him, this will be a great team.”

Not everyone was sold, and one fan blamed the network rather than Olsen: “Just pay Troy. ESPN always breaks up a good thing and makes it substantially worse.”

Aikman’s side opened talks at $30 million per year, Puck reported last week, using Brady’s $37.5 million per-season rate at Fox as a benchmark.

Sources told The Athletic, though, that ESPN is cutting costs with another round of layoffs coming and that executives see the Buck-Aikman relationship as too strained to continue.

Others went after Olsen himself. Another fan didn’t mince words: “He’s awful, what a downgrade.”

Another fan laid out a longer case against him: “Greg Olsen is horrible. He literally just has a good voice. He doesn’t research both teams enough, has a heavy bias, and says a whole lot of nothing all the time just to fill in dialogue.”

If ESPN does land on Olsen, there would be some irony in it. The Athletic reported that Buck’s 2022 exit from Fox was driven in part by his reluctance to break in Olsen, then a raw analyst, and his doubt that Fox could realistically sign Brady.

Richard Deitsch reported that Olsen’s Fox contract ends once this season wraps up.