Peyton Manning: Bill Belichick won't return to ManningCast in 2025

When Bill Belichick took the job as head football coach at the University of North Carolina, A.D. Bubba Cunningham said Belichick will continue to make regular appearances on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show and on the Monday night ManningCast.

Peyton Manning recently said otherwise.

Via Drew Lerner of AwfulAnnouncing.com, Manning told 97.1 The Fan in Columbus that the show will proceed without Belichick as a weekly contributor.

“Obviously, [Belichick] seems busy right now coaching college football,” Manning said. “So, he won’t be back this year. He’ll be hard to replace, like, I thought his insight was great. But we’ll try to probably go back to, kind of, rotating guests and, you know, having coaches and players, which I always like their insight, but also the actors and musicians that, you know, the common criteria to be a guest is you gotta love football. And I love, and Eli and I both love, being around people who love football as much as we do in all different walks of life.”

Belichick was the first ever weekly guest on the alternative to Monday Night Football. It’s unclear why circumstances changed from Cunningham saying Belichick will keep doing it in December to Manning saying, as of May, that Belichick is out.

It would have been destination viewing, if only to hear whether a voice from off camera might declare at some point, “We’re not talking about this.”