Peyton Manning Is a Huge Get for ESPN+

Peyton Manning will be doing eight shows for ESPN+, ESPN announced today. The deal is that he will be doing film study shows under the Detail umbrella, which gained a fairly large scale of conversational success last season with Kobe Bryant breaking down the NBA.

It’s hard to overstate how big a get this is for ESPN. Obviously, they would have loved to have him on Monday Night Football, as Fox would have loved to have him on Thursday nights. But, he has turned town every media opportunity under the sun before this one, and even just getting him to do these eight shows is a big boon for the ESPN+ streaming service, which costs $4.99 per month.

Per the press release, Peyton Manning’s first installment will be tomorrow:

"Manning, working in collaboration with NFL Films and Granity Studios, will host, write and share his insights to the football-themed Detail, with NFL Films editing the shows into an eight-episode series – exclusively available on ESPN+. The two-time Super Bowl champion will select NFL games throughout the current season and break down the film. The first episode of Manning’s Detail will be available Thursday (October 18) on ESPN+ and takes a look at Josh Rosen’s game versus the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, October 14. Remaining episodes are expected to be available on a weekly or bi-weekly basis throughout the 2018-19 NFL season."

Unless ESPN tells us — and even if they do — it will be hard to quantify exactly how many subscribers Peyton Manning drives to the platform, but regardless of those metrics this show will almost certainly have a ton of conversational relevance.