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Peyton And Eli Manning Return For A Sixth Season That Ends With ESPN’s First Super Bowl

Peyton and Eli Manning for Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli on ESPN2

Peyton and Eli Manning are back for a sixth season of Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli, and this one ends somewhere the alternate telecast has never been. The brothers will call Super Bowl LXI on February 14, 2027, the first ManningCast of a championship game and the closing act of ESPN’s first Super Bowl season.

ESPN released the full schedule along with details of a new on air feature. Every edition airs at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN2 and the ESPN App, produced by ESPN in partnership with Omaha Productions.

Manning Mode Puts Them Inside The Play

New this season is Manning Mode, described as an immersive Xs and Os universe that Peyton and Eli enter several times during each broadcast, sometimes with guests and sometimes alone. It runs on the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and Adrenaline’s TruPlay AI, and it is built to put real time data, advanced analytics and predictive reads on screen while the game is happening.

The pitch is that fans get to watch a play the way two Hall of Fame quarterbacks see it rather than the way a graphics package summarizes it afterward. Whether it works will come down to how often the brothers actually use it, since the appeal of the ManningCast has always been the conversation between plays rather than the technology around it.

The Full Sixth Season Schedule

Eleven regular season games are on the board, with one more edition to be announced later in the season. The schedule runs Denver at Kansas City on September 14, the New York Giants at the Los Angeles Rams on September 21, Atlanta at New Orleans on October 5, Buffalo at the Rams on October 12, Dallas at Philadelphia on October 26, Chicago at Seattle on November 2, the Los Angeles Chargers at Baltimore on November 16, Cincinnati at Washington on November 23, Dallas at Seattle on December 7, New England at Kansas City on December 21, and Houston at Green Bay on January 4. Super Bowl LXI follows on February 14.

The season opens at Arrowhead Stadium and ends the regular slate at Lambeau Field, with a Cowboys and Eagles game in the middle. ESPN built the list around rivalries and quarterbacks rather than spreading it evenly across the league.

A Heist To Set It Up

ESPN2 set the season up with a thirty minute SportsCenter Special on September 8 built around ManningCast: Heist, the short film used as this year’s schedule release, with Peyton and Eli providing behind the scenes commentary on the campaign and walking through the matchups they are most looking forward to. The first ManningCast of the season follows on September 14.

The alternate telecast has become a fixture in a way few second screen experiments manage. It has won an Emmy, it has pulled in guests from well outside football, and it now carries enough weight inside ESPN to be handed the Super Bowl in the network’s first year with the game. That is a long way from a side project.

ESPN’s broader football push this fall also includes Jason Kelce splitting his season between Monday Night Countdown and a narrator slot at EPCOT, one of several places where the network and the parks now overlap.

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