Gridiron Gizmos: How Football Tech Scored Big in Broadcasting

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Ned: She's like, You can't wait till we leave, can you? I'm like, No.

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Chris: I wouldn't say that, but I will not enthusiastically.

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Ned: I feel like this is a trap. I'm going to walk right into it. You're correct. That's right. She's just as stir-crazy as I'm... What's the inverse of stir-crazy?

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Chris: Wouldn't that be content?

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Ned: I know. Stir-crazy implies you can't wait to get out of somewhere. The opposite for me would be, I can't wait for everybody else to get out.

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Chris: Oh, that opposite. Yeah. Misanthropic.

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Ned: That's the one. Excellent. Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person that enjoys the interaction with other human beings of all sizes and shapes. I enjoy sitting around my house and listening to the complaints of my own progeny. It fills me with nothing but joy, just like a regular human person would. With me is Chris, who's also here.

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Chris: Now I think we all know that you're lying.

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Ned: That you're here? I mean, you're not here here, but you're here.

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Chris: Is anyone really here? Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?

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Ned: Oh, man. So you have basically brought up the topics for six or seven different philosophical treaties. And we're going to try to resolve that right now.

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Chris: Ontology is not just a song by Eña.

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Ned: But it does carry a nice tune. I enjoy the pan flute.

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Chris: Who doesn't, really?

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Ned: Communists.

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Chris: Filthy, smelly Communists.

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Ned: Pan flute, hate and commies. Go back to the CCCP. I don't know why. Cccp.

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Chris: Poop.

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Ned: Yeah. Nice. Nailed it. Boom. Got him. All right. With that out of the way, let's talk about something American.

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Chris: Let's talk about football because it's football season, and we all know altogether how much Ned loves football season.

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Ned: I can't wait for the Sharks to play the Jets.

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Chris: One of those is a real team, and it's the Sharks.

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Ned: See what you did there? And as someone who's married to someone from North Jersey who is a Jets fan, I appreciate it.

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Chris: I mean, this is just between you and me, right? We didn't start recording or anything, but I read a press release that got my attention, and it went in part, The Kelsey Brothers have finalized a multi-year deal for more than $100 million to move their new Heights podcast to Amazon Wundery, announced on Tuesday. Now, I'm guessing you understand some of those words.

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Ned: There were many words, but I think my favorite part is the typo in the script that says the Kelsey bothers. And that's just perfect, and I think you should leave it. But I understand who the Kelsey brothers are. I met Jason Kelsey.

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Chris: How did you pull that off?

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Ned: It He was at a HPE client event that I was helping with, and he was the guest speaker.

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Chris: So he was wandering around and very polite and had no idea why he was there?

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Ned: Absolutely correct.

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Chris: Nice.

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Ned: But he was very polite, and he signed a thing for me, so that was good. I gave to my son, who had as much appreciation for it as I did.

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Chris: Well, I'm glad that indifference is going down the family line.

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Ned: Amazon's WNDRI. Wndri used to be one of those subscription streaming things, if I remember correctly. I believe that it still is. And then Amazon bought them. Oh, interesting. See, after Amazon bought them, I wrote them off immediately.

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Chris: Yeah, I assumed it was going to quadruple in price, and there would be commercials, which is what everyone wants. I love them.

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Ned: More commercials, please.

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Chris: But no, my main takeaway from all this is that in order to make $100 million from a podcast, which is obviously the end goal here, we have to make it about football.

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Ned: Do they?

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Chris: That's the rules. That's what we're going to do today. We're going to do a podcast about football.

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Ned: Because that's going to make us a lot of money?

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Chris: Have you not been listening?

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Ned: I'm slow on the uptake. We all know this. But now that you're I'm saying it, yeah, we should... We will football the podcast.

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Chris: Touchdown. Home run. Patrick.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Now, I know what you're saying. This is stupid. Sports is stupid. Talking about sports on a technology podcast is quadruply stupid?

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Ned: Quintuplely, maybe.

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Chris: It's not a math podcast. That much I think we've established.

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Ned: Time and time again.

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Chris: But what if I told you that there is, in fact, a lot of legit technology that was either created for or accelerated by the viewing public's insatiable appetite for watching other people play silly and arbitrary games for money?

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Ned: Are you talking about the Army?

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Chris: That's a different podcast, too. Ironically, that one's also not good at math. Much in the same way that NASCAR and Formula One, which is both two sports that I definitely don't care about. However, they drive innovations, no pun intended, pun 100 % intended, that eventually trickled down to your Honda Civic. That's a thing that happens. I believe it. Similar to that, broadcast behemothss built technologies to enhance the football viewing experience that revolutionized all kinds of broadcasting, other sports, but broadcasting in general. So in light of our eventual $100 million football podcast empire, I'm going to focus on a few that you're going to recognize that are directly related to football.

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Ned: Okay, let's do it.

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Chris: So in order to get started, as usual, we have to do a little history.

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Ned: Let's kick it off.

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Chris: Now, here's a fun fact. Oh, get out. Okay. You blew that one right past me. When do you think football was invented?

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Ned: Oh, that seems like a more complicated question than you initially meant, but I'm going to go with somewhere in the late 1800s.

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Chris: The correct answer is no one really knows. However, the 1800s, early 1900s is good enough. Okay. It evolved out of rugby, and because we're American and annoying and we needed more violence, we found ways to do that.

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Ned: I don't know, man. I've watched rugby. It's pretty goddamn violent.

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Chris: It's differently violent. Differently violent.

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Ned: Betterly violent, I think.

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Chris: Well, you can't throw the ball forward, so it's also confusing-erly violent. Anyway, the sport has been around for a solid 50, 60 years, slowly growing in popularity in the United States, especially the college game. The pro game was a bit of an afterthought, and at the time, in the early, the turn of the century, baseball reined supreme. Fast forward until about the 1950s, and you had what was referred to as the NFC, the NFL, the National Football League. This is not the NFL in its current incarnation. That history we're not going to care about. But they did have a championship game. It was called, understandably, the NFL Championship. And in 1958, well before the modern incarnation of the NFL, there was a game that was referred to as the greatest game ever played. It was between the Baltimore Colts, a team that does not exist anymore, and the New York Giants, a team that won't win six games this year. You can actually watch this game on YouTube. It's called the greatest game ever played for a reason. Now, that reason has been lost from hit to history because if you watch the game Everyone's basically moving in slow motion, and they're about 50 % smaller than today's players.

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Chris: But there's a lot of other things that you will notice that are different about the viewing experience. First, and probably unsurprisingly, it's in black and white.

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Ned: Oh, 1958. That sounds about right.

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Chris: Second, the broadcast is based on one camera. That camera is effectively set in the seventh row at about the 50-yard line, and all it does is pan back and forth more or less following the ball. There's nothing on the screen. There's no bugs, there's no statistics, there's not even a score. You have to wait for the camera to pan over to the manual scoreboard. And once a play is done, the play is done. No instant replay. No takesy-backsies, as they say in the industry.

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Ned: I'm sure.

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Chris: And this was by design. The early incarnation of sports broadcasting intended to simply mimic the fan experience. What would it be like sitting in the bleachers? I mean, it's in black and white, but other than that, this is how you would watch sports. You sit in a chair or on a bench, and you rotate your head from side to side following the action. This was fine.

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Ned: It's like what they did in the early days of recording music, which is to say they put one mic in the middle of the room and everyone would play, and you maybe You had one take. There was no multi-tracking, there was no punching in, and there certainly weren't much in the way of effects. You were just trying to get the same impression you would get if you sat and watched the live concert.

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Chris: Right.

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Ned: And then technology.

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Chris: And now you can get tinnitus at home.

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Ned: We got intended.

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Chris: So this was fine for people, but they immediately started to recognize that you could do more. So static situation of imitating just sitting in the bleachers, as the kids say, did not last. Everybody recognized there were some problems with what was going on, but you were beholden to the technology at the time. For one, black and white has significant limitations. The biggest of which is everything. The jerseys, the turf, the fans, anything in the stadium, shots of outside. All of those colors were shades of gray, completely muted to the reality of whatever garish absurd fashions were in style at the time. It was a lot of pink from what I understand.

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Ned: Interesting.

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Chris: So really, black and white was saving us from ourselves. But it gave a false impression of what you were looking at. And that's like with ancient Greek statues. And you probably know this story already. But when you look in a museum or outside of the Colosseum or wherever, you see an old timey statue, they're all pure white, marble, carved outstandingly well, obviously, but monotone. All here in presentation, some might say. But in reality, when they were created, they were gaudy as all hell. The band YMCA had nothing on these designs. Abba would look at this and say, Tone it down. Everything was vividly painted with bright colors. Do you know why?

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Ned: Because they could.

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Chris: And because that's what the fuckers wore.

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Ned: Well, yeah. I mean, it's not like we invented clothing dye in the mid 1400s.

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Chris: Right.

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Ned: Like the Sun King or whatever. I I don't know time. But yeah, people have been dyeing clothes forever. I'm sure during the Greek and then the Roman Empire, they found and wanted to use new dyes, especially ones that were rare because then that would show off how rich you were.

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Chris: Correct. All of that at the time was replicated on the statues. However, over time, that just wore away because marble lasts a lot longer than paint does. But that's what we had with the black and white presentation of sports. You had something colorful and flashy and gaudy and absurd and ridiculous, and all you were seeing was this boring gray team playing against a more boring, slightly more gray team. Let's just say everybody recognized pretty quickly that we could do better. Now, funnily enough, Color TV as a concept already already existed, at least in theory. Now, TV and movies did not really go hand in hand because of a lot of the back-end technology, but everybody knows movies had color way earlier than the '50s. I mean, The Wizard of Oz is a famous movie that's 50% in color, and that came out in what? 1851?

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Ned: '52, I think.

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Chris: 1670.

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Ned: That's the one.

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Chris: Everybody knows that the reason we kept making movies in black and white is partly because it, quote, looked classier, but primarily because it was, quote, cheaper.

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Ned: It does seem to rule things, doesn't it?

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Chris: And this was the same situation with television. The first broadcast of a color sporting event was actually back in 1951. The University of California played the University of Pennsylvania, not too far from where I'm sitting at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. And it was in color.

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Ned: Wow.

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Chris: Now, this was a very limited thing. It was a test run, a proof of concept. Tech was in its infancy. And let's be honest, nobody had a color TV at the time anyway.

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Ned: Yeah, I was going I was going to say, broadcasting in color doesn't really make sense until people buy color television sets. And buying a color TV doesn't really make sense until they start broadcasting in color.

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Chris: Right. It's an interesting wag the dog situation, and I, as a person of a certain age... God.

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Ned: 6 million. Yeah, we know.

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Chris: My grandparents had a black and white TV in the basement when I was growing up. I remember that shit. That TV weighed approximately as much as their car, which I think is why they still had it. But anyway, I digress. By 1965, a mere seven years after the greatest game ever played, all of the major broadcast networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, ABC, were airing games, and in fact, starting to roll that out with the majority of the rest of their programming, you guessed it, in color.

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Ned: So to a certain degree, it was the desire to watch sports in color that drove the switch, and then for people to go buy color television.

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Chris: Correct.

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Ned: Interesting.

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Chris: Because if you think about it, sports is all about razzmatazz.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: The spectacle, if you will.

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Ned: I might.

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Chris: And watching it in black and white is fine, but it's also like doing your homework.

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Ned: You're not trying to make it classy.

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Chris: Exactly. So that was cool. And after that, Color TV took off like gangbusters. The rest in that case was history. At the same time, broadcasters started to be able to use multiple cameras instead of just one camera on the 50-yard line. This would give the home viewer a superior experience than what you could have sitting in the stadium. Now, if you think about it, this makes sense. Even if you are a super-duper rich guy and you're sitting in the absolute perfect seats, you still can't have a clear picture of the entire field. If the field is too big, you're going to be blind spots, you're going to be blocked. If you watch that YouTube clip from The Greatest Game I've ever Played, you'll see as they get to the extremes, the 5 and 10-yard line, you start to have a real hard time following what's going on because the camera is not completely parallel to the action. You add these new feeds and you give the broadcast booth the ability to switch between them. Game changer. I'm I'm running out of what times to say that was no pun intended.

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Ned: Fair.

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Chris: Now, not surprisingly, these two changes came side by side with the NFL's massive increase in popularity. It also led to another league being created, the AFL, which eventually merged with the NFL, causing the behemoth that we have today and the Super Bowl era. All of this was happening side by side by side. So it really is difficult to tell what caused what, what was a beneficiary of what, but it all happened at the same time. And the fact that it was all related to each other, I think, is really not a question anymore.

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Ned: Right.

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Chris: And long story short, even in the '70s, with these minor fixes, the TV watching experience destroys the in-stadium NFL experience. Now, there are some people that will argue that other sports, it's fun to be there in person. I disagree because we have cameras and the bathroom is clean, but maybe that's just me. We started to get new things at the same time. Side by side with the development of Color TV was the creation of instant replay. This made its... A triumphant debut is a strong sentence because they only used for two plays in 1963, again in a college setting. This time it was the Army-Navy game, also in Philadelphia. So Philadelphia invented the modern NFL is basically what I'm saying.

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Ned: That's the impression that I'm getting. And since I don't know any better, I will just believe you.

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Chris: Now, instant replay at the time was a kluj and a half. It basically required a VCR the size of a refrigerated truck to be connected to the live feeds from these different cameras, which could then record, really quickly rewind, and then sub in a replay for the live feed that was still coming off of the cameras. Hilariously, when this happened, the broadcast crew was so nervous that it would confuse the absolute shit out of audiences since they had never seen such a thing before. They directed the announcement to make it crystal clear what was happening. And at the end of the instant replay, the announcement literally said, over the broadcast of a replay of a score, quote, Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again.

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Ned: Good to know.

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Chris: Because as dumb as human beings are, people in power always think they're dumber.

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Ned: I don't know that they're always wrong.

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Chris: Obviously, it took some getting used to. However, it was a phenomenal success. Football is a game that is played at a very high speed. Therefore, you'll miss things. So having instant replay was something that was revolutionary to the broadcast experience. Next to come down the line was not just regular replay, but slow motion replay.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Now this was actually a lot harder because there was a lot of other technologies that had to develop. To do regular instant replay, all they had to do is figure out a way to split the signal, record the signal, rewind, and then replay over the live signal. Right. Slow motion replay, you have to change the way the camera works. The reason for this is simple. Standard television broadcast comes in at 30 frames per second. Actually, it's 29.99 frames per second. Shut up, Ned. 30 frames per second, fine for normal broadcast. Fast, and actually faster than the human eye can actually pick up.

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Ned: I believe it's- Yeah, we're about 24 frames per second.

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Chris: Correct, which is what movies do. But the problem with that is it only works at full speed. When you slow it When you slow down, you're looking at individual frames at a time, and you can see the gaps between the frames. Your eye no longer does motion smoothing because it's going so slow. What you get when you slow down 30 frames per second of something that's high speed, like sports, looks blurry and choppy and not clear at all. To use the technical term, it looks jank.

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Ned: Yes, I've heard that So let me guess. They had to make the cameras go faster?

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Chris: Much go faster. Much go faster, good, yes.

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Ned: Excellent.

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Chris: In order for the camera to go faster, the had to get better because you're getting less light into the sensor. And the recording equipment, because remember, we're recording this on a gigantic VCR, basically, the size of a refrigerated truck. The tape that it was recording to had to be able to move faster. Move faster and stay cool so it doesn't melt the tape, for example. Being able to rewind it and fast forward it to the point that you want to hit play, and the machine had to be able do that sensitively enough that it doesn't break the tape. Oh, and yes, you had to be able to record at least 120 frames per second, four times faster. Wow.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: But once this was all done, and it was done by the end of the '70s, or the end of the '60s, I should say, I think it was 1971, was the first time that they had slow motion replay, you gave to the director a tremendous amount of control. You could play the tape at slow motion, but you could also play the tape back and forth, which was also interesting because now you can do effectively a frame-by-frame analysis of did the player step out of bounds? Did the knee go down before the ball crossed the goal line, et cetera? All of this stuff, even with regular instant replay, probably impossible because of the blur.

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Ned: Right.

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Chris: That brings us to the next technological innovation. That really takes things to the next level. You all remember John Maddon?

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Ned: Name's familiar.

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Chris: How do you live? He's probably the most famous football commentator of all time.

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Ned: Yeah, he's pretty hard to avoid. If for no other reason that there's a game named after him that comes out on a regular cadence.

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Chris: Some would call that yearly, yes, but nerds would say regular cadence. That's fine, too.

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Ned: Pot Kettle.

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Chris: Anyway, John Madden was most famous for two things. One, his Yogi Berra-like commentary, which, if you ever watch a replay, is absolutely mystifying some of the words that come out of this man's mouth. And two, drawing shit all over the screen. Just go into town like a kindergarten with crayons.

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Ned: So I've heard.

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Chris: So the The drawing shit on the screen part is called the telestrator, which is a word that I hate. It is a portmanteau of television illustrator. I guess that's the best they could do.

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Ned: I don't know, man. I think they fucking nailed it. You do better.

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Chris: Moving on. The telestrator allowed commenters to circle things of import, draw lines that showed where players were going, especially on a stopped screen right before an instant replay, et cetera. It became popular in 1982 when it was used at the Super Bowl, but it was John Madden who made it famous. Famous enough that he used it as a prop in a foot powder commercial for years later on in his career. Tough acting, ten acting. You can look it up.

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Ned: No, I know it. But for the audience, yes. Tough acting, ten acting. For athletes' foot. Yay.

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Chris: See, you know a sport thing. It's a gross sport thing, but you got it.

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Ned: Well, the first time I heard of it, I didn't know what the hell it was. I had to look it up. And then I regreted that immediately.

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Chris: Yeah. Just shower your whole body, people. It's not complicated.

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Ned: Anyway. You don't have to wash your legs, Chris.

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Chris: They're in the water. They wash themselves. It's not how it works, Dennis. You're gross.

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Ned: Weren't we talking about people and divinity? I don't remember. I feel like that came up.

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Chris: Okay. Fast forward to September 27th, 1998, and we got something even magicaler. A yellow line on the field that showed where the first down marker was. What's cool about this is the line was not literally on the field. It was something that was in the broadcast, on your TV, and nowhere else. And this was magic. So the technology required a few pieces to make it work. But once these pieces were in place, it's actually quite simple to draw the line. So as long as you do a multimillion dollar equipment purchase and hundreds of thousands of hours of R&D, it's actually quite simple. First thing you do is put a sensor in all the cameras that you're using, because remember, we're in the multi-camera world today. So we have to be able to switch, and that line has to be there no matter what. Right. So this also necessitated the cameras being bolted in place. They are on a jimble, but they cannot move. The line does not work with the camera that runs around in the stadium. And the reason for that is simple. You You need to know where the camera is pointing. Is it zoomed in?

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Chris: Is it zoomed out? And it has to be the same every single time. Trigonometry involved here. Don't worry about it. Once you have those sensors and an awareness of what the camera is seeing, that is then synced back to a computer that has a virtual field. All it is is the lines, the grid, hence the grid iron. That grid is mapped directly onto the image of the real field, and they keep together dynamically based on the sensors that are in the camera telling the virtual field how to manipulate itself. So if you're looking square on, it's a square. If you're looking at the end zone in the corner, it's going to be more of a perpendicular parallelogram image. But because the camera stays dead center on its mounting post, it adjusts on the fly in real-time, even in 1998.

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Ned: Wow. That was running off of a Commodore 64 or something.

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Chris: Like a Commodore 61. That's a version control joke. The other cool thing about this is that the yellow line Let's just say it's on the 11-yard line. It covers the turf from sideline to sideline. But if a player walks across it, it gives the illusion that the line is actually on the field. The player breaks that line because they're standing on top of it, much as if you were standing in front of it in real life, you would be in the way. The way that that works is the virtual field only covers the specific unique green shades of the turf itself. Now, it's a little tiny bit more complicated than that, but not by much. If you've ever done color-based masking in Photoshop, it's the same thing. If a player runs across a line, it appears that they're running across the top of the imaginary yellow line. The line disappears when the player is in the way and instantly reappears when they get away from it. Pretty cool, right?

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Ned: I wonder if that creates restrictions in what colors are allowed for uniforms.

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Chris: Yes and no. These days, it is a lot more sensitive, and you almost never see the line make a mistake. But if you look back at old footage, you will see times where the player becomes part of the field for a brief period of time. Imagine a time where they have a dive or a sliding tackle or something, and they get a large stain of green up their pants.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Well, if it's too close to the actual color of the turf, sometimes they would have that yellow on their pants.

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Ned: Look, of course, they would have no idea.

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Chris: No, because it's not there in real life. Like I said, the technology has gotten a lot more sophisticated since 1998. That almost never happens these days. Okay. However, it introduced something that I think is absolutely irreplaceable in terms of broadcast value. Knowing where the first down marker is is incredibly important in the sport of football. Much like in baseball, knowing where the strike zone is is incredibly important. And that technology is based on the same idea as this. You go back and watch a game from the '70s or the '80s, and there's no strike zone, and you're annoyed about it. Ask me how I know.

[00:33:39.07]
Ned: I mean, if I'm watching baseball, I'm probably annoyed to begin with, but that would make me more annoyed.

[00:33:45.14]
Chris: And again, this is something that it makes the viewing experience from your couch superior to being in the stadium. And simultaneously, if you ever do go to a big game like that and there's a close play, what does everybody do?

[00:34:02.01]
Ned: We look at the Jumbotron. Exactly.

[00:34:04.03]
Chris: You're in the stadium watching a television.

[00:34:08.17]
Ned: That's like going to a giant concert and watching the Jumbotron because you can't even see the stage.

[00:34:14.15]
Chris: I, too, remember Live 8. So where are we now? I'm going to skip some things that happen because, frankly, they're boring. We all know about high definition. We all know about 4K. We all know about the advent of streaming. I think we all got under control. The final technology setup I want to highlight is one of the most modern ones, and this is going to encompass the era of 2010-ish until now. And they involve tracking players and the ball via RFID. If you've watched any modern game on any channel, you're going to see instant stat and updates and commentary from the broadcast team about things like player top speed, acceleration, separation time, as well as 3D interactments. That's a word. I'm sticking with it. 3d reenactments of what just happened. Or if you're watching a fun game, you can see something like the same exact game being broadcast on Nickelodeon, and they're going to be playing, except they're going to all be characters from Toy Story. That's a real thing that happens.

[00:35:25.16]
Ned: I want to watch that more.

[00:35:27.05]
Chris: Yeah, they use Slinky as the first down marker. It's pretty funny. The kids love it. All of this is accomplished with what seems like shockingly simple technology. There are RFID tags under the player's shoulder pads, and sometimes also in the ball. Rfid tags, as you know, are basically weightless. So they affect the play of the game, not at all. The field is absolutely blanketed with sensors for RFID. Once again, trigonometry. This allows those sensors to give live updates of all the different data points for all the players, the ball, etc. And give us those statistics so that we, the smelly couch dwellers can think that we know what we're talking about. One way this might be familiar to listeners is next Gen stats powered by AWS.

[00:36:25.17]
Ned: So that's what they actually mean by that. Yes.

[00:36:29.21]
Chris: It's interesting that it comes from AWS because obviously, in order to make this happen, we fall out of sports, out of broadcasting, directly into the realm of big data. The amount of computing power that is required in the back-end to make these things happen in real-time is enough to make a Bitcoin miner blush. I'm going to skip some of the details because we're already short on time. But the process of getting this stuff turned around from play to data on your screen involves multiple stages. First, the raw data from all of the sensors is collected. It is all filtered and cross-checked against the other sensors to remove noise or errors. Next, that data is analyzed using complex and probably very expensive intellectual property algorithms that calculate the various metrics that are interesting to the broadcast, such as speed, location, acceleration, distance, etc. Finally, this information rendered into pretty little pictures that are synchronized with the live video feed, ensuring that the on-screen graphics align perfectly with what's happening on the field. In order for that to happen, it has to happen in real-time. Otherwise, it's not convincing, and it's not useful, and it's annoying. No one cares that Jalen Hertz was running at 21.6 miles per hour four seconds ago.

[00:37:58.09]
Chris: I want to know right now. I want to know now, Ned.

[00:38:05.11]
Ned: All right. Now. Right now, he's sitting on a couch somewhere listening to this podcast. Thanks, Jalen. We know you're a big fan, and we appreciate you.

[00:38:14.19]
Chris: So what do we have to look forward to in the years coming? I'm curious because I think we're getting to the point where we probably have enough and we need to stop. Never. Silly. Silly, silly. There's already ways to render the entire play for all the players in three-dimensional virtual players, spin that around to show the same play from any angle, even upside down. I don't know why you do that, but you can. Next, I've heard tell that they're going to do VR experiences so that you can watch the game as though you really were in the stands or as though you were really a player. Note to the audience, I do not recommend this. Nfl is dizzying enough when you're just playing backyard ball. It is going to be incomprehensible if you're looking through the visor at NFL speeds. You think you want this experience. You do not.

[00:39:18.29]
Ned: I agree with you 100%.

[00:39:25.03]
Chris: That's it for what I wanted to highlight. But hopefully, it makes sense that you can see the parallels and the things that came out for the nonsportswatching TV world from the sportswatching TV world. I mean, let's look at the easy one. What was the last time you watched anything in black and white that wasn't Casablanca? Exactly. Slow motion is used as a storytelling tool in TV and movies, not just in sports. There's slow motion in the Gilmore Girls. Just saying. I mean, so I've heard, allegedly. Admittedly, there's a subset of the on-screen graphics and real-time data feeds that are probably innovations we could have done without, but they're used in plenty of educational materials. Think of the last time you learned something from YouTube that did not have some video overlay. You can indirectly thank John Madden for that. Boom. Well done.

[00:40:31.27]
Ned: You did it. Well done. Well, hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You've accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch. No, really. Go sit on the couch. It's fine. Watch the Jets lose yet another game. And, I don't know, drink the tears of Jets fans. They're probably pretty bitter, honestly. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever. Go to our website, chaoslever. Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general Tom Fulry. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

[00:41:20.05]
Chris: I'm just trying to see how many burns you can get so you eventually end up having to sleep on the couch.

[00:41:26.08]
Ned: I'd said she was born into a family of Jets fans. I didn't say she was a Jets fan. Important distinction.