Al Michaels seemingly takes shot at Eagles on TNF broadcast while praising Bills

Al Michaels made an interesting comment during Prime Video‘s Thursday Night Football broadcast of the Week 3 contest between the Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins. Michaels, while praising the Bills, took an apparent shot at other teams around the NFL.

“Some teams are good but not particularly interesting,” Michaels said. “The Buffalo Bills are a great team to watch.”

In the mind of most on social media, this was shade directed at the Philadelphia Eagles. Of course, it could be any “good” team around the league but given the conversation this week, it could very well be Philadelphia.

The Eagles and the Tush Push

The reigning Super Bowl champion Eagles are 2-0, coming off a 20-17 Week 2 win over the Kansas City Chiefs this past Sunday. The major talking point coming out of that game was, yes, the Tush Push. Philadelphia dialed up the controversial play seven times throughout the game and were successful in doing so, much to the chagrin of fans outside of Philadelphia, who felt the Eagles should have been called for a false start on multiple occasions.

Per Mark Maske of The Washington Post, the NFL said in its officials’ training tape sent to teams this week that the Eagles should have been called for a false start. Maske said the NFL is instructing officials to call “these plays tight and make sure that every aspect of the offensive team is legal.” The Chiefs believed the Eagles committed multiple false start penalties.

“You can’t get all the calls right,” Chiefs defensive lineman Chris Jones said. “Just because we see it, sometimes the official is 15 to 20 feet away and sometimes they can miss those small things. We think he jumped multiple times. The official didn’t see it, so it wasn’t called. We just have to go play the next down. It happens. People jump all the time.”

The Tush Push has been a hot topic since last offseason. In May, NFL owners came up two votes shy of banning the play. The proposal to ban the Tush Push was created by the Green Bay Packers, who lost to the Eagles in the NFC Wild Card Round of the 2024 playoffs.

The play is here to stay — for now. Philadelphia will continue to try to be perfect on the play.

“I think that the one clip I saw of it was slowed down so much that I’m not sure you can see that to the naked eye,” Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said. “I mean, it was slowed down so much, and I get how we can manipulate things and show things like that, but it was slowed down so much, it was like, ‘Right.’ But we have to understand that we have to be perfect on that play. And we’ll keep working on being perfect on that play.”