o1mnikent

In the new issue of The Atlantic, a fascinating piece on the hardest job in football:

…spend a weekend with a network production crew, and you’ll discover what it really takes to turn the on-field action into televised entertainment—intense preparation, frantic effort, brilliant improvisation, and an artistic genius named “Fish.”

[...] By the time Fish moved from news to sports in the mid‑’70s, the union was complete. Since then, broadcast dollars have helped turn players into multimillionaires and owners into billionaires. The medium has infiltrated the game itself, from TV time-outs, when players mingle aimlessly on the field waiting for commercials to end, to coaches’ challenges that rely on footage from network cameras to revisit questionable referee decisions. On the sidelines, coaches and players scrutinize shots from overhead cameras to study tactics and plot countermoves. Viewers watching at home see virtual bands drawn across the field denoting the lines of scrimmage and the first-down marker, and they can refer anytime to a floating graphic in an upper corner of the screen that displays the score, time remaining, and down and distance.