Thank you to Shawn Sailer for posting this on Twitter.
Ever wonder what a major sports production looks like from the inside? Almost 50 million viewers took in last weekend’s Cardinals-Panthers NFC Championship game on FOX, and it pretty much went off without a hitch. When I worked in television production, the analogy we used was that we were ducks swimming on a pond when doing a show. Our feet would be kicking, motoring along and sometimes scrambling, but on the surface all would have to be calm.
For three hours on Sunday night, 45.7 million Americans tuned into FOX’s broadcast of the NFC Championship Game. They watched Troy Aikman and Joe Buck narrate the Panthers’ 49-15 rout over the Cardinals as Cam Newton clinched a Super Bowl berth and a half dozen local kids snag game-used footballs.
What America didn’t see: 18 cameramen, lively production trucks, countless texts between fathers and daughters, hundreds of hours of film study, and a manila envelope holding the secret to Ron Rivera’s maturation as a head coach. For three days leading up to the game, The MMQB embedded with the FOX broadcasting crew to lift the veil on what goes on behind the scenes.
The full article is well worth a read, and is here.
