Joe Buck, ESPN’s Monday Night Football play-by-play announcer, says he can’t remember looking Troy Aikman in the eye once a game starts. Aikman watches his monitor. Buck watches the field. When something has to land, Buck grabs his longtime broadcast partner’s forearm. When Aikman wants a replay, he leans in, and Buck taps his shoulder. 

Such is the chemistry that not so very long ago, Aikman said, Would I like to continue working with Joe Buck moving down the road? 100%.”  That’s 25 years of no eye contact and no wasted words. Aikman has said he can hear Buck go quiet and still know the thought isn’t finished. Some bonds don’t need talking. Until, apparently, they do.

Before Monday’s Rams-Bills game, the two reportedly argued over their ESPN contracts. On Thursday, Aikman didn’t deny it.

“There’s probably a time and a place for all that,” Aikman said this morning, per Joseph Hoyt. “I don’t know if now is the time. I don’t know if it’s hard to figure out kind of what happened. I’ll broadcast through this season and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens. I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this season does hold and the Super Bowl and all that and where my next landing spot may be.”

The veteran announcers joined ESPN in 2022 on five-year deals, reportedly worth $90 million for Aikman and $75 million for Buck. Both entered 2026 in the final year. But while the network reportedly extended Buck on a six-year, $108 million deal, Aikman has not received a formal offer, according to Front Office Sports. Buck’s raise puts him at roughly $18 million a year, level with Aikman’s current salary. Both are represented by CAA, a setup that had made a package deal possible.

Buck’s contract runs through the 2030 season, which includes ESPN’s second Super Bowl in 2031. Aikman, who has previously acknowledged the contract delays, sounded caught off guard when he spoke to Richard Deitsch on the Sports Media Podcast earlier this season. It’s the first time he has entered the last year of a deal since signing with the Cowboys.

“I thought something would be done prior to the start of this season,” said Aikman. “I’ve never gone into the last year of a contract ever since I signed with the Dallas Cowboys. And so I thought that it would be done. It’s not. When it might get done, if it gets done, is anyone’s guess. And it’s really not something that I’m putting a lot of energy into.” He said he hadn’t spoken with ESPN executives about what Buck’s deal meant for his, adding that how much of the decision is his was “yet to be determined.”

According to FOS, Buck “broke the ice” on the unspoken tension just before Monday’s broadcast at SoFi Stadium, raising the subject of Aikman’s expiring deal. An argument followed, then cooled. Nothing showed on air over a three-hour-plus telecast that went to overtime and featured 35 fourth-quarter points. ESPN declined to comment. Aikman stopped short of saying he is leaving, and he didn’t say whether he would return if ESPN made an offer.

The 2026 season carries significant weight for both Aikman and Buck as well as for ESPN, which will air its first Super Bowl. Super Bowl LXI is on Feb. 14 at SoFi, the same building where Monday’s argument reportedly happened. Aikman’s case for a new deal isn’t thin either: their Week 1 Chiefs-Broncos telecast reportedly drew 23.2 million viewers, ESPN’s biggest Week 1 audience for the package since it landed Monday Night Football in 2006.

But his future with ESPN remains uncertain. If he reaches free agency, he’d be among the most sought-after names on the broadcasting market, though nothing is concrete.

The most obvious opening is at CBS. The network and Tony Romo mutually parted ways on Oct. 2, about two months after his July OWI arrest. J.J. Watt has worked beside Jim Nantz since Week 1, and CBS says he stays through the rest of this season. It hasn’t said what its top booth looks like after that. Amazon Prime Video reportedly has a new deal with Kirk Herbstreit, though the contract is believed to include an escape mechanism. Amazon was also linked to Aikman in 2022, before ESPN came in with the stronger offer. One FOS column floated Netflix as well.

An NFL front office is another possibility. Aikman consulted for the Dolphins last offseason, which led the league to apply the same team-access rules to him this season that govern Tom Brady, a Raiders part-owner and Fox’s lead analyst. The details of that arrangement aren’t clear, so it’s unknown whether he’d be available to other teams. Matching his $18 million broadcasting salary would be a stretch for any of them. Aikman has also been critical at times of how Jerry Jones runs the Cowboys.

This isn’t Aikman’s first exit that came down to communication. When he left Fox in 2022, he said the move came down to “a lack of communication.” He opted out of his contract because he and the network couldn’t agree on fair market value. Fox Sports president Eric Shanks, he said, didn’t speak to him until calling to congratulate him on the ESPN deal. Aikman went first. Buck, with a year left at Fox, had to “weasel” his way out, as he put it. Fox got the Penn State-Purdue game from ESPN in return.

That history is why Buck’s comments last month land differently. “He knows where I’m going to go before I go there,” Buck told Front Office Sports Tonight’s Matt Iseman of Aikman. “He knows I’m his biggest fan.” A source outside ESPN offered FOS a bleaker read: “I think you’re seeing the end of the marriage unfold.”

For now, the booth carries on. Their next call is Monday, Oct. 19, when the 49ers host the Commanders.