On the latest episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” Fox Sports Senior VP/Production & Talent Development Jacob Ullman called watching the NFL as important to Thanksgiving as “turkey and pumpkin pie.” He told our Andrew Levin that Thursday's Washington-Cowboys game will be “one of our biggest broadcasts of the year” and that the network will be breaking out its specialty cameras to make the broadcast as special as possible. In addition to breaking down the holiday broadcast, Ullman also discussed travel precautions, broadcasting the NFL during a pandemic and dealing with scheduling changes.
On precautions around traveling on a short week from Indianapolis to Dallas:
Ullman: It’s not that much different for our crew. Lots of our crew is cognizant of particular air carriers that space differently and have a preference for that, but in terms of flights that’s as close to business as usual as possible. Then, with rental cars, we’re limiting those to one per person and taking some extra precautions. Obviously, crew dinners, which would normally be such a big part of a holiday like Thanksgiving, aren’t taking place, but we’re adapting and coping like everybody is.
On challenges with production caused by the pandemic:
Ullman: We were lucky as well as the NFL in the respect that the way the calendar worked, they got to learn and we go to learn from a lot of our other productions, what we did with NASCAR, which was kind of the first big sport to come back, and Major League Baseball. A lot of those learnings have applied, and we’ve had constant dialogue with our main day-to-day contact at the NFL … which started well before the season came. They leaned on some of our learnings with NASCAR but even with what we were doing with the German Bundesliga and the enhanced audio that we were using there in the stadiums that didn’t have any fans.
On scheduling challenges with game cancellations:
Ullman: The scheduling has been pretty seamless. We had a unique situation earlier in the year where we were scheduled to do a game in Arizona and because of some COVID-related issues with the Raiders that ended up switching, and we ended up doing a Raiders game. It’s a very 2020 story in that I’m trying to let our crew know as quickly as I can because it’s a Thursday. Most of them are traveling either that day or the next day. Mark Schlereth was the analyst on the game. I called him to let him know this was happening, but he was actually on a plane flying from Denver to Arizona. He was still at the gate, and he’s like ‘Should I get off this plane?’ I said, ‘Yep, get off this plane.’ Low and behold he was able to get off the plane and get on a flight to Las Vegas. The fact that that’s been the exception as opposed to the norm really says something about what the NFL’s accomplished this year.
