“The Sporting Image” is the summer 2024 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Illustration by Ivy Johnson.
The first-ever pregame sports commentary show, Football Preview, premiered on CBS in 1956. Over a modest fifteen-minute running time, a team of network analysts introduced the star players and dramatic stakes of the matchup to come, encouraging viewers to stay tuned for the main event. This space also allowed more opportunities for advertisers: those priced out of in-game slots might be able to afford one during the preshow, while well-heeled sponsors could cram in a second or third commercial.1
The sight of a squad of analysts at a desk would now be far too visually sedate to open a National Football League game. These days, NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast draws viewers in with a theme song: “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” performed by Carrie Underwood, which retrofits Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You” with a country-pop sound and lyrics about football. In the two-minute sequence, we find Underwood on a CGI platform held aloft by wires, descending onto the stage of the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas (brand alignment—Underwood has an annual residency here). A lens-flared haze of football highlights swirls in the air around her; the players are phantoms freed from their host TV screens. “I’ve been waiting all day for Sunday night!” she belts, welcoming us to the maelstrom. We cut from the concert to flit across a computer-generated city, where jumbotrons on skyscrapers display headshots of the evening’s commentators and rival quarterbacks. Underwood gazes past these buildings toward a stadium, its searchlights angled heavenward; the CGI headlights of cars below blur into continuous lines, animated to resemble time-lapse photography. Framed over the shoulder, Underwood looks like Bruce Wayne watching Koyaanisqatsi (1982). A cut, and these lines of light snake up into the sky and across the country, wrapping the nation in Underwood’s Sunday sermon. Back at the concert, a crowd of extras screams as Underwood busts out a drum solo, channeling the power of football to become her most spectacular self. (NBC, unprompted, revealed in an advertorial that she can really play.)
Sunday Night Football (NBC, 2023).
Tripp Dixon, the creative director of all of Underwood’s SNF title sequences since her 2012 debut, has said these pyrotechnics should function as a dinner bell to call people to the game. His Pavlovian strategy is paying off: 2023–24 was SNF’s sixteenth consecutive season as the year’s top-rated primetime show for viewers 18 to 49. It is no exaggeration to call this a lifeline in the streaming era: live sports are the last bastion of reliable ratings for linear television. Competition is intense for the US’s most valuable sports franchise, and broadcast rights have been splintered across several networks on different days.
This competition has shaped the way that these broadcasts actually look and feel to watch, full of computer-generated surrealism to catch the viewer’s eye. Virtual- and augmented-reality technology has allowed for in-game interventions both mundane—say, the superimposition of logos on the field—and bizarre—the Carolina Panthers and the Baltimore Ravens recently animated their mascots in mixed-reality bumper sequences, transforming them into CG behemoths that fly and romp around the real-world field. Nightmare-fuel ravens aside, AR technology has also been used to liven up pre- and postgame shows (“wraparound” commentary). Network analysts no longer have to Cronkite it up at a news desk; they can speak to us from an animated football field. (The backdrop could, theoretically, be anywhere or anything, but these shows have yet to adopt a logic that’s fully hallucinatory.) The logos of sponsors still appear on studio surfaces and screens, but they also float around the studio space like holograms, no longer confined to a commercial break.
The actual content and purpose of NFL commentary may not have changed very much since Football Preview, but these eye-catching displays of mixed-reality can make a network seem more cutting-edge than their rivals. Because the NFL is so valuable, the networks put massive amounts of capital toward crafting the splashiest possible production; this was the strategy long before the days of CGI. Today, these extravagant virtual worlds are a final line of defense against an even larger threat: the potential obsolescence of linear TV.
The Carolina Panthers debut their mixed-reality mascot (2021).
The first live TV broadcast of an NFL game took place in 1939, when NBC covered a Philadelphia Eagles and Brooklyn Dodgers game. Ebbets Field in Brooklyn was chosen for its proximity to the Empire State Building’s transmitter, which could beam the game out live to any viewers within a 50-mile radius. Football coverage would be sporadic and regional until 1951, when AT&T’s new broadcast net made it possible to broadcast live, coast to coast. The first channel to nationally televise a live NFL game is the now-defunct DuMont Television Network—at that point brand-new and looking to become a player on par with CBS and NBC. They paid $75,000 to broadcast a championship matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cleveland Browns, and by the 1953–54 season, the channel had secured the rights to each Saturday night primetime game.
The DuMont network’s financial resources paled in comparison to those of CBS and NBC, and in 1956, the network folded, seized by parent company Paramount. The NFL’s regular-season rights went to CBS, and the Championship rights to NBC. But there was no league-wide broadcasting contract at this point—CBS had to make separate, piecemeal deals with individual teams to broadcast their games regionally. As they built out their NFL coverage, CBS debuted Football Preview in 1956, thanks to the arrival of videotape technology earlier that year; it would have been impossible to create a show reliant on preserving game highlights any earlier.2 The show was prerecorded, a prologue to the real action. During the game, another announcer, stationed at CBS HQ, chimed in with breaking scores and information from around the league, in voice-over.
The NFL Today (CBS, 1975–89).
CBS’s NFL preshow went through some small changes throughout the ’60s—it expanded to 30 minutes in 1967, and ex-football stars like Frank Gifford and Johnny Lujack were among the decade’s anchors. But in 1975, this coverage went through a significant phase change: CBS introduced the first live pre- and postgame wraparound program, The NFL Today, setting the template for the modern commentary show. CBS’s broadcast drew its energy from the personalities of a core team of hosts: play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger, ex-cornerback Irv Cross (the first Black national TV sports analyst), reporter Phyllis George (among the first women in TV sportscasting), and, by 1976, sports bookie Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder. The preshow program featured game highlights, reported segments, and other sports news from the week; in their regular block of postgame commentary, the first show of its kind, they could react as a panel to game highlights, a far cry from prerecorded conversations or an announcer dryly sharing scores as if from a ticker-tape. George would interview players to try and coax out a more personal take on the season, while Snyder would advise viewers on which teams to bet on. All of this happened live on the set that would, from this point forward, be known as the “CBS Sports Center,” another first for this sort of nomenclature.
By “Waiting All Day…” standards, ’70s football broadcasts look tame. A segment from a 1975 episode of The NFL Today suggests why: they’re focused on perfecting coverage of highlights from the game itself rather than supplementing it with additional material. We watch the stadium crew correspond with the network HQ to create the segment packages for live halftime shows, and the workflow is reminiscent of a frantic Houston in Apollo 13 (1995). Still, there were some striking graphic accents; the theme sequences of the ’60s and ’70s featured evocative silhouette flourishes. For the 1978 Super Bowl, CBS experimented with state-of-the-art in-game visual effects:3 they developed an Action Track, which drew a path of motion onscreen in the football’s wake, and used an Electronic Palette to overlay watercolor-esque illustrations of the players in interstitials.
By the ’80s, highlights were easier for analysts to manipulate, with more slow-motion and integrated text overlays. During the 1982 Super Bowl, John Madden debuted an invention from Len Reiffel: a Telestrator pen to annotate replays for clearer and livelier game commentary. CBS made some first forays into flashier visuals, with mixed results. The 1983 intro to NFL Today was animated in the style of Tron (1982) or early video games, and the music skewed to the tackier edge of the ’80s—keytars and honking brass were in, your dad’s sentimental big-band march was out.
CBS NFL theme (1965–69).
A new era of wraparound commentary arrived after a seismic deal. In 1993, the Fox Broadcasting Corporation paid the NFL $1.58 billion to acquire the rights to National Football Conference telecasts (comprising half of the teams in the league) for four years, then inked a $500 million deal with New World Communications to obtain a dozen affiliate stations, whose contracts were on the verge of expiring with the big three major networks. Fox was now a force to be reckoned with, and pregame coverage was integral to their strategy.
At the start of the 1994 season, Fox premiered the first-ever hour-long NFL pregame show: Fox NFL Sunday. The vibe was looser and louder, and often featured prerecorded sketches. In the cold open of the series premiere, host Terry Bradshaw (freshly plundered from CBS) sits astride a horse, dressed as a cowboy, hollering that we’re on the verge of a “new frontier—not gonna change the game, sure ain’t gonna change me!” Welcome to the next chapter of the American experiment. Bradshaw gallops down a traffic-cleared Hollywood Boulevard, then ties his horse up at his designated Fox studio parking space while hooting, “Time to go to work!”
After the network theme song—classy and brassy, not a keytar in earshot—we cut to live footage of Bradshaw showing us around the brand-new Fox studio. He spreads his arms wide as the camera zooms out to drink in the space. On the upstage right side of the studio, several network analysts—“crack research people,” Bradshaw calls them—are seated at a bullpen of computers. Bradshaw pulls back the curtain on a formerly behind-the-scenes space, proving that Fox Sports is a powerful nexus of breaking news. Or, as Bradshaw puts it: “They’re gettin’ that stuff, they’re gonna hand it to me, and we’re gonna pass it right on to you!” Passing, receiving—perfectly on theme. There’s a traditional anchor desk, but there’s also a separate “skybox” space for VIP interviews; it looks very morning-show, with lounge chairs, a coffee table, and a football-field backdrop.
Fox NFL Sunday (September 4, 1994).
Most of Fox NFL Sunday’s bells and whistles aim to avoid a static shot of four people seated at a desk, and to keep the viewer from getting bored and—pure sacrilege—channel-surfing. David Hill, then president of Fox Sports, had been tasked with building the network’s sports division from the ground up in less than a year. With this flagship show, he wanted to avoid any delivery of stats that felt akin to eating your vegetables; he asserted that there wasn’t enough entertainment in sports coverage. Following Hill’s advice, Bradshaw is most excited to show us a miniature turf football field on stage left, on which he and his co-hosts can act out real plays from the game, thus making their commentary more active. This does add a little variety to the visuals, but one can’t help but feel it’s more fun for Bradshaw than for the viewer. Later in the show, he tries to show us how an Achilles tear might affect a quarterback, but without a close-up on Bradshaw’s ankle, we only register a man in a suit and tie hopping around studio turf in a low-resolution wide shot.
During this period, Hill also introduced the US to something we now take for granted, the score box. In 1992, Hill was the head of Sky Sports; one day, frustrated he couldn’t follow the score of a soccer match he turned on late, he snapped. He developed the score box to emulate the scoreboard at the stadium, and introduced the graphic and game clock to Premier League games as soon as Sky secured the rights. Two years later, Hill brought the score box and clock to Fox’s NFL preseason—at that point, it was known as the “Fox Box.” Competitors followed suit, not for the viewers’ benefit, but because the box doubled as game-length real estate for sponsors’ logos. Dick Ebersol, then president of NBC Sports, hated the idea at first, worried that viewers would surf away from blowout games or get annoyed at an unnecessary graphic intervention. He told the Ringer that this was “foolish” in retrospect, but now that sponsored messages are digitally applied to football fields, basketball courts, and pitcher’s mounds, his comments presage a slippery slope for in-game graphics.
Howard Cosell interviews John Lennon on Monday Night Football (ABC; November 20, 1995).
From 1970 to 2005, ABC had Monday Night Football, the national primetime venue for marquee matchups. After DuMont folded, CBS and NBC both tried a weekly format for brief stretches in the late ’60s. When it was time to negotiate a broadcasting contract for the 1970–71 season, only ABC, trailing in third place, was willing to preempt their scripted Monday-night lineup for the length of the football season. At first, MNF ratings were strong. Their halftime coverage attracted a diverse array of celebrity guests; one show from 1974 put John Lennon and Ronald Reagan in the same room. But ABC faced a logistical challenge: West Coast games often started too late for East Coast viewers’ convenience. Ratings started to slide in 1984—also when the influential and reliably hotheaded sportscaster Howard Cosell left—and by the time ABC tried an earlier start time in 1998, MNF was setting record lows.
We can detect ABC’s desperation to recover in MNF’s wraparound programming. MNF debuted a very cheesy theme song in 1991: a football-centric rerecording of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” by Hank Williams Jr.; both versions share the sonic palette of an Applebee’s commercial. The 1991 intro sequence features a cameo from Bob Saget leering at a cheerleader. MNF also began airing cold opens, including a seizure-inducing one-two punch from 2003, in which a sketch featuring Christopher Lloyd as a preacher segues into the so-called “Monday Night Anthem,” performed by Hank Jr. and Aerosmith. The latter sequence endeavors to focus-group the shiniest possible object for young male viewers, chroma-keying the band onto an ever-refreshing backdrop of flashing bulbs, the MNF logo jitterbugging around, and the word “AEROSMITH” in Impact font. This was no one’s future. The members of Aerosmith were in their fifties, and Steven Tyler has always looked like he’s beginning to melt.
Christopher Lloyd, screaming for salvation while surrounded by a gospel choir, tells us where this weekly broadcast was moving: to Sunday. The NFL proposed this switch because then major games could take place in the afternoon, thus solving the East/West Coast problem. NBC paid $3.6 billion for the Sunday Night Football contract, and scooped up ABC’s broadcasting crew, including John Madden.4 Goodbye to the retrograde masculinity of Hank Jr., hello “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” performed first by Pink, then Faith Hill, then Underwood. Money is no object: NBC pays $2 billion per year for broadcasting rights, while production costs are somewhere around $50 million a year. NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus told the New York Times Magazine that they don’t recoup these costs in ad revenue, but the “value” SNF adds to the network as appointment viewing is of prime importance.
Aerosmith on Monday Night Football (ABC, 2003).
SNF’s pregame show, Football Night in America, adopted Fox’s hangout tone. A 2006 sizzle reel for the show situates us in Studio 8G of Rockefeller Center, next door to Saturday Night Live: the set features a couple of 103” diagonal flatscreen TVs—the only two on the planet, they insist—and a lounge area with leather chairs so that the hosts can recline as they view highlights. Otherwise, the show is your average sportscast with an anchor desk and straightforward graphic overlays. Considering the money NBC pumped into broadcast rights to the game itself and the attention the channel paid to the lavish theme sequence and play-by-play team, they seemed comfortable letting the wraparound show run itself. The recipe was established in the ’70s: a news desk, a team of analysts and former players, highlight reels, sponsor packages, and a theme sequence. Fox might have loosened the vibe, but there wasn’t much else to do with the format.
In 2015, Fox Sports challenged this assumption, tasking its “Fox Lab” initiative with exploring how virtual reality might be harnessed for sports coverage. At first, this meant a livestream viewed through a headset, which was soft-launched for the 2015 US Open. But recently, Fox has sought to revolutionize wraparound commentary through virtual production, a combination of live video with real-time virtual-reality effects. In 2019, they overhauled their North Carolina NASCAR broadcast with the aid of recent breakthroughs in gaming technology; Epic’s Unreal Engine made it possible to render graphics in real time, live on the air. On the set, Fox’s hosts stood in front of a 50-foot-tall green screen, but for the viewers, their surroundings could transform in the blink of an eye. This was all thanks to set-extension effects—animated scenery that makes the studio space appear larger or grander—and augmented-reality graphics—virtual elements that can interact with real people or environments. For NASCAR, producers could arrange CG cars in front of the desk so that the studio resembled a showroom. An animated slice of the Daytona speedway might pop up to encircle an analyst speaking about the grade of the curve. And no more boring photo overlays—enormous headshots of the drivers, twice as tall as the commentators, could erupt from the ground alongside towering leaderboards.
Virtual production became more popular during the pandemic, allowing scripted shows to complete their shoots when location travel was impossible. So in 2022, Fox Sports decided to revamp their Studio A in Los Angeles: the home of their flagship NFL broadcast, their most valuable property. Instead of the green screens of the NASCAR set, Studio A is the first live setting to use an LED volume. They’re functionally similar to green screens, but they’re essentially large TV screens, which, like rear-projection, make it possible for hosts to see background elements and animations. VFX software called GhostFrame enables the broadcast to be multi-camera: it makes the animations’ depth and perspective appear consistent as the broadcast switches between four different live angles. (Because of the way that GhostFrame accounts for parallax, the broadcast visuals look multilayered and blurry to anyone on set, like a 3D movie viewed without 3D glasses.) In a sizzle reel prepared by Unreal Engine, we learn that this workflow requires sixteen gaming engines to output the broadcast live in 4K, seven compositing engines to add AR effects, and two more engines to display the proper parallax in-monitor. That’s 25 total, but the financial and environmental impact is left unquantified.
Fox NFL Sunday (2022).
Studio A has real-world elements—a desk, an archway, even a mezzanine—but the LED volumes can transport anchors to Unreal-generated renderings of other spaces. In the sizzle reel, there’s a snippet of a broadcast from a virtual desert with cacti, perhaps designed to complement a game taking place in the Southwest. Studio A was where Fox staged their Copa America broadcasts, all set in a cathedral-like virtual environment dubbed the “Basilica of Soccer.” (Unfortunately, the basilica’s steeply angled 3D archways crop game highlights into a truncated, U-shaped frame, which obscures any action taking place in the upper corners.) Another industry leader in set extension is Asharq News, a partner of Bloomberg News headquartered in Dubai. During the pandemic, they moved demonstratively into the mixed-reality space, most notably for this segment on, of all things, the technology of fighter jets. After the anchor walks us through a virtual airplane hangar, the segment is structured around dramatic takeoff animations, allowing the sequence to hop between locales.
Asharq’s 2022 World Cup coverage used AR to place the commentators’ desk on a circular 3D platform in the middle of a virtual soccer field. An anchor would stand in the middle of the platform while gazing out toward a remote interviewee on a CG jumbotron, speaking to them across the virtual stadium—the wanderer on the sea of fog, calling out from the edge of the cliff to a lost lover. Needless to say, this looks extremely awkward and easily distracts from the discussion at hand. The same is true of other applications of AR in TV news, such as when meteorologists appear to wade through their forecast map.
World Cup coverage (Asharq, 2022).
“We try to differentiate ourselves by being storytellers, but also [by] trying to provide a viewer a different way to see things,” explains Zac Fields, Fox Sports’ Senior VP of Graphics Technology and Integration, in the Studio A sizzle reel. “Storytelling” is a lazy industry buzzword—and truly inescapable in other discussions of NFL AR—but the craft of sportscasting does rely entirely on narrative, finding compelling ways to describe the conflict at hand and get the viewer emotionally invested. At their best, broadcast graphics should elegantly communicate the stakes—Madden’s Telestrator pen was like a paintbrush, a tool to render and illustrate his thought process. In the Studio A sizzle reel, the Fox Sports team excitedly discusses the potential of this technology to communicate in the same way, but the examples we see under their narration are ludicrous: the hosts (Bradshaw’s still here) toss a football around a virtual field, and they answer trivia questions like “Who is convinced he saw a UFO with a former college teammate?”5
On the set at Fox, AR photographs of quarterbacks hover near the presenters like holograms. These images do the same work as standard portrait overlays; the difference is the addition of an uncanny element to be gawked at. A comparably spectral effect is achieved in a sponsor block, when the camera glides past a floating, wall-sized advertisement for Bounty Paper Towels. It’s the type of news-as-infotainment Chris Morris was already satirizing in the late ’90s on The Day Today and Brass Eye: a technologically cluttered and unnecessarily labyrinthine set; gratuitous graphics packages that suggest astral-projecting into a fractal; an aura of frenzy. Based on the elaborate, confusing “soccermeter” Morris created for Alan Partridge’s World Cup coverage in 1994, he’s one of the few I’d trust to artistically manipulate an LED volume today.
The Day Today (Chris Morris and Armando Ianucci, 1994).
The commentators aren’t the only ones to grace Studio A with their presence. There’s also Cleatus, an enormous robot who looks like Optimus Prime in a football helmet. He was first sketched in 2005 by the seven-year-old son of Gary Hartley, the executive VP of Fox Sports; Hartley was looking for a new edge against CBS, who’d signed a new NFL deal. CBS certainly didn’t have a mascot, and no one knew that it was possible to have a mascot like Cleatus.
Cleatus was animated through motion capture by gaming company Blur Studios. He made his debut at the beginning of the 2006–07 season. As Mark Wilson writes for Fast Company:
He had no name, no origin story, and no fundamental logic justifying his existence. Yet viewers seemed to slowly adjust to this new reality like it had always been reality—that a robot doing jumping jacks next to an advertisement for a Ford F150 between plays was simply the natural course of things.
The natural course of things is, in fact, pretty obvious. Most aesthetic transformations in sports broadcasting are about attracting more viewers and generating more ad revenue. When a sports presenter speaks to us from a virtual basilica, the networks are right to bet that we’ll stop for a moment to ponder that strangeness, holding our gaze to appease Lord Nielsen. And if we’re taken aback by a SportsCenter broadcast on ESPN that’s swathed in wall-to-wall promotion for Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), parent company Disney can only hope that we’ll be aware of the imminent release of one of their most expensive products. For his part, Cleatus has proven integral to the Fox brand by cameoing on The Simpsons and by supporting network partnerships with Beats by Dre and Monster Jam.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell presents the 2020 Draft.
But the logic of linear TV is subject to change. Netflix, Amazon, and Apple TV are all venturing into sports broadcasting. There’s a generalized anxiety about courting Gen-Z viewers, who are less engaged with sports overall. (Mark Cuban, of all people, sensibly pointed out that ticket unaffordability is a key factor.) The networks aim to combat these shifts by innovating their “storytelling.” ESPN has built on their existing brand, premiering a new version of SportsCenter on Snapchat that trades in shorter segments, quicker cuts, and “the language of social media.” Other tactics seem like peripheral fluff—as a bit of brand synergy with Disney, ESPN recreated a 2023 game between the Jaguars and the Falcons for a special broadcast set in the Toy Story (1995) universe. The network’s senior director, Spike Zykowmy, told IndieWire that this was a way of encouraging kids to get into sports while “leveraging Toy Story nostalgia for adults.” One could argue that this is simply the Space Jam (1996) playbook, but Space Jam was a narrative world unto itself, not a useless filtration of a sports game through IP.
For their Thursday Night Football “Prime Vision” broadcast, Amazon has introduced AI models that use onscreen highlighting to predict which play each team will and should run. As Ted Nguyen reports for The Athletic, maybe it’s true that this will help viewers feel like they’re on the field alongside the quarterback. But this analytics-driven mindset misses the humanistic side of sports commentary, so reliant on the personalities on the field on a given night—and the personalities behind the scenes. A football game is must-see TV for flukes of human error or unlikely feats of strength; the strongest commentators are able to make that real for the audience.
For an onscreen environment that brings all of this to life, look no further than NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s basement. In 2020, this was the makeshift set of the pandemic-era NFL Draft. In a behind-the-scenes video, he shows us how his “man cave” has been reconfigured to accommodate cameras, a small crew, and a workstation with his Surface tablet where he will announce picks. The setup looks endearingly cramped, and the ESPN broadcast of the Draft itself is serviceable—maybe even better than the usual event at an arena, since you get to see the players’ family members cheering them on from home. It may lack polish, but wherever the world of sports broadcasting goes, that human element is the surest piece to bet on.
- Dennis Deninger, Sports on Television: The How and Why Behind What You See (New York: Routledge, 2012), 58. ↩
- Deninger, Sports on Television, 57. ↩
- “Two New Devices Debut in CBS’s Coverage of the Super Bowl,” Broadcasting, January 16, 1978, 60. ↩
- Madden’s journey through the world of sportscasting almost perfectly mirrors this history of wraparound commentary: he was at CBS from 1979 to 1993, Fox from 1994 to 2001, ABC from 2002 to 2005, then NBC from 2003 to his retirement in 2009. ↩
- Aaron Rodgers, obviously. ↩