Report: Brees to join NBC, in line to call SNF post-playing career

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees is signing a deal with NBC Sports that will give him a prominent role on NFL telecasts once he retires as a player, Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reports.

NBC and ESPN were reportedly vying for Brees, who would have been a candidate to take over as a future Monday Night Football analyst if he had chosen the latter.

Instead, Brees will join NBC and reportedly be groomed as the potential successor to Sunday Night Football color analyst Cris Collinsworth.

NBC pursued Brees ahead of the NFL's next round of TV rights negotiations. The network could potentially secure multiple NFL packages in the next media rights contract, which would allow it to utilize Brees and Collinsworth as color commentators on separate broadcast teams.

NBC is already planning to replace longtime play-by-play man Al Michaels with Mike Tirico following the 2022 Super Bowl.

ESPN hoped to land Brees for its struggling Monday Night Football broadcast team, which is expected to receive another makeover in 2020. The duo of Joe Tessitore and Booger McFarland was widely criticized last year, and the lineup featuring the two of them plus Jason Witten a year earlier was generally considered to be even worse.

ESPN is reportedly considering in-house candidates Dan Orlovsky, Louis Riddick, and Brian Griese, along with external options including Kurt Warner and Nate Burleson, for the analyst role. The channel reportedly tried to acquire Michaels from NBC in a trade but was turned down earlier this offseason.