College football is a game of sights and sounds, west touchdown credible, from screaming fans to marching bands. It's the raucous atmosphere that sets college football apart from everything else. Except during a pandemic last fall, media partners and broadcasters were forced to adapt on the fly to unprecedented circumstances. This is how they made it work from the solid verbal. This is a special production. So now what welcome back?
My name is Ty Hildenbrandt, joining me as always over there in Chicago, the one and only Dan Ruvenstein, Sir, how you doing. I'm good.
I'm licking my proverbial chops. I don't know if that's too evocative over this episode, because we have done already a couple episodes looking at the twenty twenty season in the twenty twenty year from a college football perspective as a whole, and this episode is all about how you and I and I think a majority of people consume the twenty twenty season. Obviously a lot of people went to games, but not nearly as many as normally do, and not nearly as many people socialized in the way
that they normally do around college football. So This is an episode that I think we are going to dedicate to the broadcast and fan, the home fan experience and how different it was in twenty twenty, and hopefully how it will never happen again, but just sort of debrief on what it was like consuming college football only as a TV product, which I know you and I did.
I know a lot of people also went to games once again, but it was more than it ever was a TV product, So debriefing essentially that product itself.
What amazed me the most in watching from home last year was how much, for the most part it felt the same. There were a lot of elements, as we'll find out here shortly, that needed to be made up on the fly. They were very much shooting from the hip b DSPN or CBS or anybody broadcasting a game. But I think for the home viewer, by and large, the product mostly felt the same.
Yeah, yes and no for me, just because I didn't watch it with anybody. My wife feigned interest at times during Michigan games that we watched a little bit of because that's where she went. But even it was not a fun year to watch Michigan football for Michigan fans and there was just, you know, the lack of electricity watching the TV product. Even when stadiums were empty and
they piped in sound, it didn't feel the same. There would be those big wide shots after a touchdown and you wouldn't see anybody or nearly anybody, depending on the conference you were watching in the stands. I think there was a certain amount of energy that was extremely hard to replicate that. I'm sure broadcasters and broadcast teams and networks tried to do their very best, but it was
it was very different from me. But also my personal life was very different and moving around the country and such, So maybe my experience was unique.
But it was different to me. It definitely was different. It was still good to have the product on TV and to help us unpack a little bit more about what that was like, we brought on a Niche Shroff from espno broadcaster has called college football games for a good long time now, A niche longtime friend of the show. We asked him, what were your thoughts when all hell was breaking loose in March, taking a longer view on what it could mean for a college football season.
I had as busy of a month as I can remember in March of twenty twenty, and I remember when I got done, I had done three games in three cities on three consecutive nights, and I thought, wow, March is just getting started. And then the next week everything goes away, everything shuts down. Realistically, at the time, I felt kind of how I think a lot of people felt, Okay, there's no way this is going to stretch into the fall, right. I thought we would be okay or close to okay.
And then as the news kept on trickling in and every week would copine, things got worse and worse. You're like, oh, man, are we.
Going to have a season that rings so true? I remember doing our live streams, we were yeah, in the very beginning, alarmed, as we all were alarmed that this could have some impact not just on society but on the sport we know and love. And then yeah, as the summer wore on, as we got closer to the season, as we detailed in our first episode of So Now, when we talked through the big ten decision making, it became very apparent that this was going to be a
different kind of year. I'd imagine if you're a broadcaster, this being your livelihood and all, it's rather concerning. We asked a niche, what were your thoughts as we got a little bit deeper into this thing, and it became a parent that, yeah, you might not be able to go to games. You actually might have to call them from, say a remote studio somewhere in Charlotte.
And I'd done some games remotely from studio, but football is a different animal altogether. There's so many moving parts, so many things to see, and all of a sudden it was, oh, Okay, this will be challenging. This is going to be a piece of the puzzle. And then you're sort of formulating a game plan. What do you need to see? Where are your eyes going? Well, we have cameras for this, who's going to be or liaison
on site? And it really became this collaborative process on essentially trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle.
I did not know until just this past year that they could pull this off in terms of.
Remote broadcasts, having the play by play and analyst in a studio in Charlotte or Connecticut or Los Angeles or something.
Not to this extent, I had visited the Big ten studios, Big ten Network studios at some point, and I saw the closet where they, I guess, would do remote broadcasts of other events, but sure in none of those cases was it ever something as robust as a football broadcast, where you've got so many different moving pieces, so much to account for different camera angles, what have you. When it became a pair that this is a direction they
were headed, my ears perked up. I'm not in the broadcasting business to the same extent and niches, but I was wondering at that point, how the hell are they going to pull this off?
Same and I knew that football had been called remotely, but those generally, those remote broadcasts, from what I know, are the quote unquote smaller games, fewer cameras, fewer graphics, fewer replays, stuff like that. So there was not a huge need to have a big, robust remote situation. But the thing is with the networks, they had the lead
up time. This wasn't something that snuck up on them, so they were able to get their ducks in a row for weeks, months whatever to say, Okay, this is how we're going to operate with this, This is how we're gonna operate with that, this is how we're going to do this remotely, so they were at least able to plan for a different kind of broadcast year, so it would feel normal too idiots like you and me,
and so I I think I noticed certain elements. Obviously, it's hard not to notice the announcers not reacting to things happening with crowd energy in the same way. That's easy to see that, like, okay, this is a little bit different when you're calling a Boston college game and it's just a bunch of cardboard cutouts, it's hard to
sort of match the energy of the moment. But largely technologically, you know, graphics would come in, replays would come in, there were different camera angles, and I maybe there were fewer games where you had the zipline cam whatever that's called. But I don't know if I fully noticed it. So I by and large thought, you know, ESPN, CBS, Fox, the regional networks, the conference networks did as good a
job as expected. So I came away very impressed because essentially, ty, they're you and me, right, they're better versions, but they're at home or they're in a studio just podcasting games live. That's what it kind of is.
I didn't really notice the small details right, that might have been off with a broadcast. Obviously, you look out in the stands, there are no people there, yet you hear crowd noise, which we will talk about momentarily, right. You know that that's fabricated, and you can sense that maybe announcers are a bit disconnected from the moment. But a lot of the little stuff I thought they did a pretty good job of papering over. And that's a
credit to everybody involved in these productions. You know, you talk to somebody like a niche again, whose livelihood is broadcasting games, and you don't necessarily have a level of understanding of the nuance that goes into it. These guys take it very seriously. Every little inch of the football field. They're trying to get a description of what's going on out there. Little things like context that you might be able to pick up before a game.
It's just different. You know, there's something about game day at a stadium. There's something about that game day environment. One of the things that I usually like to do when I get there just survey my surroundings. What do you pick up using your eyes and ears to ask questions? You don't get that anymore. You're at the mercity in a lot of ways of the school providing you with information, and as we all know, schools will provide information to make them look as good as possible.
And even little things like building rapport with the broadcasting team.
Just being on the road with your colleagues and going out the night before the game and grabbing dinner, having a glass of wine, just building chemistry and camaraderie. You just don't have that. Everybody's masked up. We are all socially distant. They're very careful about where you can sit and how far you can stand.
Now, in a Niche's case, he broadcasted games remotely from a studio in Charlotte, and thankfully Tom lougan Bill was in the same studio as him, so at least he had some report or being so he had his announcing partner physically there with him. You and I can speak a lot to what it's like when your co host
is not with you. Correct. It has taken us the better part of a decade to build up this rapport, So you can imagine, especially going into a new football season, sometimes teams are mixed and matched on the broadcasting front to try and build up that level of understanding with your co hosts so quickly. In a new setting, everything is completely new. There are new inputs, new outputs. I again am really surprised and quite impressed that it all went as well as it did.
Yeah, and it's not just the on air people, right, it's the people that are spotting who's tackling who, or who's substituting in for whom. There's the producer in the broadcaster's ear. And you know, certain broadcasters work better with certain producers. They understand what they like. They understand like, okay, this is when I like the replays coming in. This is how quickly I want to see the replays in a step display or whatever.
I think.
There's a lot of nuance behind the scenes that and even in times when things are quote unquote normal. We all remember those games where all of a sudden, there is no wide cam available because it's foggy, and we need only the cameras on the field, or all the other cameras go out except for one main one, and the one main one's trying to track all the action.
And that's normal times. And so in terms of communication behind the scenes, it is that element of you know, the duck looks common, serene above the surface, but underneath it's paddling like all hell. And so I think there was more of an element this fall than ever before, and the better broadcast just masked everything a lot better. But no, it was fascinating to hear him talk about the different elements that needed to come together.
Just so, how do you overcompensate for the situation not having the crowd noise, not being there on site?
You're trained depending on where you're calling the game, if you're at a Clemson or an LSU or Virginia Tech one of these raucous environments. A lot of times, the best thing you can do on third and one is shut the hell up and just let that crowd roar, especially if it's the defense looking for a stand or whatever.
You just let the crowd go, and the crowd becomes that extra person in the broadcast, and that amplifies the moment more than anything that you can say, Well, that's not there now, And you always worry about over talking and saying too much, And in some of these cases, when you scale it back a little bit, all of a sudden, it's sound of silence. Right where is everybody? And you almost feel, all right, do I need to jump in a little bit? So you almost have to recalibrate your process a little bit.
Recalibrate the process.
Dan.
One of the questions that you had for a niche that I get the sense you were very excited to ask, was about the crowd noise, right, yeah, the fake crowd noise, the fake crowd noise. What were your thoughts on fake crowd noise this year?
Dan?
It was very strange, And it was strange because I found myself getting comfortable with how normal the broadcast would feel in those games in which maybe it was only friends and family, maybe it was a few, a few hundred, or no fans at all. The one game that specifically stood out to me that I really was able to connect to the fact that there were no humans watching
the game. I'm almost positive this is true. Michigan, Michigan State in the Big House, which is of course already in a cavernous place defined by how large and overwhelming
it can be. Michigan State has the upset, and there would be a number of wide shots that were supposed to, I don't know, add environmental character to the situation, and there was a feeling of these players snuck onto the field on a Wednesday morning to play a game, almost like I'm almost positive there's a tradition like the student newspapers, the Michigan and Michigan State student newspapers, they played the night before, and it had that feel to it where
it was, why don't we just all throw it like a pop up?
It's a pop up game.
Why don't we just I don't know, why don't we mess around on a Saturday morning and play some college football and just let's just do it. Let's go crazy and do it. So that stood out to me. When I would hear the crowd noise followed up by shots of no humans, I was my brain almost felt like it was it was getting tricks played on it.
It was.
It was very strange.
I get the sense that a niche was in a very similar spot. First and foremost, we asked him where'd the crowd noise come from?
Well, as far as I know, for the games that I did, most of the fake crowd noise was being pumped in by the schools themselves. So it was the PA at the school that would be in charge of that.
So the schools are pumping it in, which is an important bit of context. We also asked him like, was it helpful to you to hear this noise at all? Or what was your take on it?
From my standpoint, it was helpful not being there, because if you are there and it's okay, we're looking around and I see two hundred people in the seats or nobody, and you're rocking all this crowd noise, come on, who are you fooling? But not physically being there, it actually gives you this fake sense of hey, something is happening and something is important, and it props up your energy by proxy.
So the crowd noise helped him more being off site than it would have if he were there.
Can I tell you something, I have no reason to doubt a niche Okay, he would know better than you or I would. But I have been in the Fox truck, like the a team Fox truck, NFL Fox, not college Fox. So this is like the team that would do a Super Bowl or a you know, NFC championship game. The huge, the biggest of the big crew, the Aikman Joe Buck crew. And this was for a documentary thing I worked on a few years ago, and I got to watch the audio mixer do his thing mid game a huge game.
It was Patriots Saints, I believe, in Foxborough and he had a mixer with like, I don't know, sixty four channels, thirty two channels, some crazy number of audio channels, and I got to watch him as a player was carded off, move the button up, the lever up for the sad Fox theme the butta dunt dut du dun dut du
dun dunt into commercial. So I know the pure raw power that television has from an audio perspective, and it is still hard for me to believe that that a version of that guy didn't exist in Bristol or in LA to sort of level out the environment as the game was going on, because I do know the raw audio power available to these networks, so no reason not to believe a niche. But at the same time, it
would it wouldn't. It doesn't fully make sense the networks would give that much control over the TV broadcast audio to the random stadium audio engineer. I don't know, and I think it was different depending on the sport. I know back in the fall, if you watched any like Premier League soccer, you could watch one channel that had the crowd noise and another that really yeah, they would allow you to watch a different station that didn't have it,
maybe online or through one of the pay services. So just a really weird again layer of context that some of the networks tried to add in to make the product feel a little bit more authentic. The audio junkie between us, you are the person who pays attention to things like that, whether it's an audio form or the audio during a TV show or whatever. Where were your
ears and brain connected watching these games? Were you just accepting this fake noise as like, yep, okay, this is I've accepted it and I'm not.
Paying attention to it.
Or were you paying closer attention as you were watching a game in a bigger moment, knowing like, I don't know which game it was. I think Notre Dame was at Boston College, right, so you at least had one Notre Dame game where there were zero people in the crowd. Did that take you out of anything? Were you paying extra close attention to how the audio engineer was riding the levels? Was that something you paid attention to.
Riding the level? Sure? I tend to pay attention to the volumes of the two commentators. It's really easy for those volumes to get a little bit out of sync and to feel a bit disconnected from the game, especially when someone's doing a broadcast remotely like that. And there were a few instances is where you heard it, But by the end of the year they got really good at it. They got really good at mixing everything down.
You're talking about with the with the fake crowd noise, you're talking about it with the.
Crowd noise, with the other microphones that maybe they had on site, the whistle, the sound of the players hitting each other, things like that. It was really easy, I think in the beginning for some of the voices of the commentators to be a little bit too loud, or one to be too loud, in the other to be a little bit too soft. And by the end they got really good at doing it.
I noticed I was able to hear whistles and yelling from the sideline onto the field early on in the season. I couldn't tell you a specific game, but like when an offensive coordinator was trying to get the attention of his quarterback, or when there were substitutions being made and somebody was yelling for a linebacker to run off the field. I did notice that I was hearing those more than I normally would, which makes sense. Obviously there's there's less
sound to interrupt everything. But yeah, I think you're right that in the beginning of the season there were there were audio instances that felt different.
We asked a Niche, what was the remote studio set up? Blake, If you sat down at your desk, what was in your field of view?
The peripherals would be. I'd be sitting on the right side of this extended broom closet if you will. Logan Bill is to the far left in front of me. I have a desktop computer, and on that desktop monitor, my stats guy Paul Newman, would type in there and I would see what's going on. To the left of that, I had my monitor a little bit elevated. That was our program feed. That's the game itself, it's what the
viewers are seeing on television right above that. They could give me one extra monitor, one extra camera, so I had the all twenty two, and then in that same monitor I had the stats feed. Then I had a second monitor or a second laptop which had net return, which is the feed on a delay, so sometimes it allows you to see a play twice if your replay. It allows you to see the highlights when they do a cut in, so you're able to kind of watch that. Okay,
you're showing Kyle Pitts here from Florida. We can react off of that. And then there was an ISO monitor, which is where our producer can show us things before they come on air, whether it's a graphic or an edit or a package. Hey, look in your ISO. Let me know when you want to go to this. It's all, you know, broadcast jargon. But there were a lot of inputs. A lot of inputs.
Sounds very complicated. It doesn't sound unlike some of the rigs that you and I have put together. Obviously a lot more sophisticated, sure, but it's very clear the more we talk to a niche how they were cobbling this thing together. Again, I think they all did a very admirable job of doing it, but a lot of it was shooting from the hip, trying to get the best
information they could to the posters. Like one of the interesting things that Aniche said was that he's not usually a phone guy, you know, a cell phone guy during the game, but you're trying to get as much information
as you can in the moment. And so whereas before maybe he's tweeting and texting periodically throughout the course of a game, now he's tuned into his phone throughout the entire broadcast, using it to get whatever information maybe the school is putting out or someone on the ground is putting out.
If that particular game didn't have a sideline reporter, didn't have producers on the ground overhearing seeing a player get carried off because of an injury or whatever, the circumstance taken into the injury tent, whatever, that they're searching for information, just like the rest of us. There's a certain helplessness I'm sure that comes from broadcasting a game remotely, and I can imagine looking at screens and trying to be an authority on what's happening eighteen hundred miles away. It
feels inauthentic. It feels like you are are literally read now literally maybe figuratively, reaching to appear to be.
In the know. So Aniche mentioned the All twenty two camera Dan right, it's the coaches angle from way up high that they watched tape from Yeah, interesting story on why that monitor ended up being one of the ones in front of him.
You may have had a camera guy have a COVID test, and so now I've got a backup camera guy. And that's the stuff people don't realize. And guess what play action pass he's fulled and he's not following it. Well. Now, us as play by play guys and analysts, for the most part, we can only see what you see on TV. We had that early in the year and they said, hey,
what if we had the ALL twenty two? So you have that on an extra monitor, and so that situation happened in a game and I can look up and I can see, Okay, I'm off to the other monitor. Now I can see that it was indeed a pass. He threw it downfield and the ball was intercepted or it was caught or whatever, and you can still call the play.
You have a lot of instances like this. The Deeper we got into conversation with a niche a bunch of instances where they tried something, maybe it didn't not work, but through the course of their normal business, decided there were other things that they could do to further optimize another example, spotters. You know what a spotter is, right, yep.
Spotter's a guy who is keeping track of who's making plays, keeping track of key events in a game, feeding all that information back to the broadcasters.
We had a spatner who was on site and basically had a gizmo where he's got my spotting board, and when substitutions are coming in and out, he can point and say, hey, this guy's in, this guy's out, or update me on injuries.
Figuring out how to communicate with the remote staff. It's hard enough you're in a studio somewhere in Charlotte, physically removed from the game, artificial crowd noise again through your headset, a bunch of monitors that you're not accustomed to in front of you, trying to paint a picture with your voice as to what is going on. All the while, you still got to communicate with others who are connected. I don't know if a Niche said, maybe Skype, maybe phone,
maybe zoom. Who knows you are trying to collect all of these parts to put together a broadcast.
And the other part of it too is and he sort of touched on this, but when broadcasters aren't in the stadium and they're not in the town and they don't go out the night before, and it's not that they're going to get a pulse of whatever it is Tennessee football or Missouri football or cal football. They're not going to get that in like you know, they're parachuting in.
They're in and out. But there is that element of feeling feeling the energy in a town the night before and the seeing the out of town fans, seeing you know, the excitement for the game in the morning, and then traveling to the stadium and seeing people tailgating. It can't help but feel the people broadcasting and producing the game that they're part of something big, that it's building to
a moment. Even if it's a game between you know, two unranked teams, people are still so excited for football. It's not even just about the noise and energy in the stadium, because as we know, college football is a cultural thing, right It's showing up at six am to set up your tailgate, and so everybody involved in that broadcast sees that they can sense the excitement, so they're wanting to take that excitement and put it into the game themselves. They feel the weight of the scale of
that game. So it's something that I mean, I'm not saying poor them, I'm saying more poor us, because we like it when a broadcaster is into it that understands that even though Oregon or Notre Dame loss last week, we're still feeling good about this week, We're still feeling optimistic. We still can't wait to get loud in the stadium. And so it's imps possible to me for anybody in a remote room, as good as their rapport is, to
be able to bring that to their microphone. And so that to me is something that I noticed a little bit. But in hearing a niche talk think, I don't know how you possibly fake it. It just seems impossible.
This was the one that got me when he talked about the statistician at home.
We had a statistician who was watching the games at home. Well, how could he communicate with us? So in the beginning, it was on a zoom call and he'd have a chat box and he would type in the chat box. Well, the issue there is what if I'm not looking at that chat box and I look at it three plays later and he's got something up there? Is that still relevant? So they came up with this other system where we're
both on this website. We both log in and it's almost like a whiteboard where he'll type in and then once it's no longer relevant, he hits one button, it's gone and he can type the next thing. So if I'm looking in, whatever I see in there will be relevant.
Were they using Google Docs for this?
Dan?
Isn't that?
How? Gosh?
Who what?
There was a general that was having some sort of inappropriate relationship and that's how they were communicating live Google Docs.
I think so.
I think that's the case, but I don't know if they were using Google Docs, but they're using something very similar to it. It sounds like they were using something like Google Docs. And this is where it got real interesting for me, because you know so much of what we do. I'm not comparing what we do, but all these years has been very cobbled together with these tools
that we could find on the internet. And I think desperate times called for desperate measures in this case, and ESPN and CBS at anybody broadcasting a game, be it via TV, radio, you name it, had to improvise and had to see what tools were at their disposal and basically use all of them until they got the formula right. Aniche said openly, look like.
You have to almost owen thinking, Okay, there's certain things. If I miss, it's going to happen, and I can't beat myself up over it.
You're never going to be perfect. But at least over the course of the season, it tended to get better at it, and I think by the end, honestly, it was a pretty close to normal product, albeit there weren't the normal number of people in the stands, the normal amount of fervor around a football game, just because of COVID.
Yeah, if you remember, we talked to Adam Amin who's now at Fox last year he called College Football Forever, and he talked about that ability just in reference to the All twenty two camera that was added that when he or any broadcaster is in the booth, they could see Amari Cooper breaking loose deep and so their voice could rise to match what they're seeing. And so I
think the networks piecing together. I know certain networks had, you know, people in games or in stadiums, and certain didn't, depending on the size of the game or the size of the broadcast. But it is that ability to on the fly say Okay, I need to add this display so I can see this, or we need this element to the spotting or the stat guy or the graphics or the replays or whatever we'd like to be able
to shuffle on the fly. I think is fascinating because that's nothing you can do typically in the same way in the booth itself.
The operative question now as we move forward is how much of whatever new ground we broke in twenty twenty will be carried over into twenty twenty one. What do you think? I think they've found some ways that they can further optimize the broadcast. They certainly have figured out that they can do this if they have to. I don't think anybody wants to. But in a pinch, if you're looking to cut some corners save a few pennies, yeah, it's always an option.
I think. Oh, you mentioned that you were at the Big ten network and you saw their setup right for doing this with basketball. Yeah, that they would have production crews at this and then they would beam back the feed and they would have broadcasters in the Chicago studio. I think. I mean it, it was happening with football before it was happening more and more with some of
the smaller games I had heard. You know, ESPN was doing some of this experimenting with remote broadcasts, which is I mean on the broadcaster side, I'm sure they hate it for the reasons the niche is already laid out. But knowing that you can save money and almost approximate a normal broadcast, I think we're going to see it way more. Maybe not in the near term, maybe not. You know, we're going to see maybe the broadcasters get back in the stadium just because it's the healthy thing
for broadcast crews and production crews. But I think long term, I think places are going to look because it does cost a ton of money to send a crew and broadcast a game remotely from it's not remotely, but from a stadium. I think we're going to see it much more. I really do.
And I think they will be able to apply what they've learned from twenty two. They will further refine the tools to make this more readily available or a better product for the home viewer. They will find ways if it involves saving money to make the products sound eighty five percent of what it normally would if the crew were there on site, I mean, we have technology available already where you can just have a drone fix its sites on a specific you know, on a raft or
a dog, and just follow it. Right, We're not terribly far away from automated cameras following action. Maybe it'll be a couple of years or something like that. But as technology gets better, technology is gonna get cheaper. That's what always happens, and so I think it's definitely going to carry over because what are we seeing more and more that live sports are the one thing that people will pay to view. As it happens, people aren't paying to
watch dramas or comedies the second day premiere. Cable subscriptions are down, but all of these networks are paying an astronomical amount of money. We just saw what ESPN, ABC pay for the SEC once their deal is up, and I think they're starting to broadcast it early. So the rights acquisition fees keep going up. Are still through the roof for football, especially, so.
On that back end, the networks are going to Sure, they're going to get some streaming money, they're going to get advertising revenue, but at the same time they are going to look long and hard every single time one of these deals comes up and they're figuring out budgets. They're going to look long and hard at how they can broadcast a high quality game at low quality prices.
Thanks for listening to So Now What Technical Difficulties Part one. You can catch our full interview with a niche out on our Patreon at verbowlers dot com, and don't forget to come back soon for part two. Then the co