The People at the Desk Matter

We've been a bit sports-centric lately at Remap lately, albeit some of it against our will. We knew the Chicago Bears would garner a lot of attention this season, but we didn't anticipate it would look like...this.

This is our burden, our curse, and we're glad (??) to share it with you. It's always a treat to check Bluesky and seeing countless people doing sicko mode, hoping we'll record a podcast about yet another Chicago Bears misery event. Fortunately for you, we've obliged.

We don't always watch the Chicago Bears! Arguably, we shouldn't! But you watch enough sports for enough years that you start to develop really strong thoughts about how you're watching those sports, too.

You know Rob is on one when he randomly sends Patrick a link to a Google Docs page with several hundreds words strongly engaging with the format of a football television broadcast.

What else do you think we started Remap for?

Rob: Now Patrick, you know I hate Jeff Bezos and Amazon Web Services BUT: I have to hand it to them: Thursday Night Football is the best broadcast in sports right now.

There are critiques you can level against it: the games are frequently bad, a problem that has dogged Thursday Night Football since the NFL started pushing it as a way to get more games into primetimes TV programming. By definition a Thursday night game is out-of-sync with the regular rhythm of an NFL season, and most of the times the teams playing it will be on short rest and reduced prep time, which makes for scrappier and less well-played games. Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit are not the most dynamic commentary duo, though I think most of the issues there is actually down to the fact that Herbstreit is about as workmanlike a color analyst as you can get.

But here’s the thing: TNF on Amazon is the only new NFL product in years that has rivaled or even surpassed Sunday Night Football on NBC. It’s sent out in HDR with a decent 1080 bitrate, which makes it visibly better-looking than any game I get through broadcast networks, a taste of what sports could and should look like if anyone had any incentive to make a better product. The audio mix is awesome, with calls at the line being audible alongside some detailed crowd noise (like the rattling bleachers at the Browns stadium in the snow game there a couple weeks ago). They are terrific at getting great asides, like Jameis Winston’s incredible pre-game speech before leading his team out against the Steelers, where he gets into a good rhythm and realizes he lost his point, so backtracks and clarifies what he meant, all without breaking his “tent revival preacher” persona. 

So far that’s all just a normal football broadcast with a bit more attention to detail. But the thing that really differentiates it is the alternate broadcast, billed as Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats. It’s pitched as the broadcast for stats nerds (which is itself nice given how much gambling lines have overtaken statistical analysis in sports broadcast graphics) where analysis and AI work together to highlight key parts of the game. But the really nice feature of this broadcast is that uses Madden-style spotlighting on key personnel, which makes it way easier to see receiver and pass rusher groupings before the play, and it uses camera angles that give you a better look at football than any other broadcast. 

Most of the time the Prime Vision broadcast uses a wider shot akin to the beloved All-22, where you can see the whole field of play at once, which is the only way for modern football to be comprehensible given the way the passing game has become the cornerstone of the whole league. But they’ve also leaned hard on an overhead angle this year that lets you see the play almost from the perspective of the whiteboard play diagram where every football play is born. As someone who loves watching line play, that angle is the only one that really lets you see how the defense brings pressure and how the offense tries (or fails) to counter it. Crucially, it also really lets you see how critical it is to open up sightlines for the quarterback, which is an aspect of the game that totally gets lost in the side-on view most broadcasts use.

Amazon is the only player in the sports space that seems to have really thought about how you can present a match in a modern context. Maybe some of their approach was influenced by their need to do a dog-and-pony show for AWS and the various enhancements “AI” can supposedly make to everyday tasks, but it does seem like that brief led them to a novel and more thoughtful production. It really highlights how small and unambitious most of the other broadcasters are in their thinking. You start the week off with Thursday Night Football where you’re getting this rich, cutting-edge presentation and then on Sunday you’re watching Fox, where the big innovation between 2023 and 2024 was sticking a headset on Tom Brady.

Patrick: You are the second person to bring up Amazon Prime Video’s special way of showing the game to me. They stumbled upon it while trying to mess with the configuration options, and suddenly went “hey, uh, did you realize you can watch the game in this completely different way that’s extremely cool?”

The weirdest part about watching football, compared to just about any other sport, is your inability to fully grasp what is happening on the field. In other sports, replays are important for, say, trying to understand an injury or why a flag was thrown. In football, it’s often because you cannot fucking tell what happened while you were watching, whether because of the sport’s increasingly byzantine rules that determines whether a catch happened, or because the default angle does not accurately portray the flow of plays.

But this also leads to one of my favorite moments in any football game, when the camera operator, who has most likely been filming football games for a huge chunk of their life, is tricked by what unfolds on the play. Their camera movements follow where the ball is supposed to go, but in reality, it’s going something else entirely. You watch as the camera jerks towards the action and buddy, I’m chuckling the whole time. 

It’s actually kinda interesting how little has changed between the origins of NFL broadcasting and now?

I mean, check out one of the first broadcast NFL games. Naturally, it has the Green Bay Packers: