It appears the door has closed for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Louis Riddick as Riddick has reportedly signed a new contract with ESPN.
Riddick was one of 16 candidates interviewed for the Steelers General Manager job over the last three months. While Riddick has been out of football for several years, his ties to Pittsburgh put the Steelers high on a very short list of places that Riddick would've considered leaving media to go work for.
Riddick has been one of the announcers for ESPN's Monday Night Football for the last several years and will continue to announce some Monday night games moving forward. ESPN announced a new main Monday night football announcing crew earlier in the year with Troy Aikman and Joe Buck jumping from Fox to the network.
Riddick and fellow crew member Steve Levy will now become the No. 2 Monday night crew for ESPN. With the network now transiting to having more games on Mondays, the network needs two teams.
Last month, Riddick said that he couldn't talk a lot about the opportunity or how it was going during an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But he was expected to make it to the second round of interviews.
“I can’t say very much,” Riddick said at the time. “Simply because this is something that it needs to play itself out. Obviously, everyone knows what my connection is to [Pitt] and this city — what that would mean for me, what that would mean for my family and how it would be kind of like a full-circle moment for me.But we’ll just let this play out. Obviously, there are a lot of other good candidates. Mr. Rooney is someone who I don’t think anyone here has any lack of trust in making the right decision, and he’ll do just that. However it shakes out, it won’t change my connection to this city, this university and anything else that’s involved. We’ll see what happens.”
Even though a new contract with ESPN could complicate things for Riddick, it's possible that he's still being considered. We've seen it time and time again from players and former executives that work in the media. They sign new deals with their current companies and then the get the itch to return to the NFL and suddenly it doesn't matter if they're under contract by a network or not.
