Men's Journal

Fox Sports is preparing for Sunday’s game like an NFL head coach. Director Rich Russo lays out his playbook for the biggest production on TV.

Interview by Sam Barclay

When you tune in to Super Bowl XLV, it won’t just be a game you’re watching. It’s a made-for-TV reality show of smashed cartilage and anguished looks — shot, edited, and aired on the spot. Last year, 106.5 million viewers (530,000 more than the next most-watched event, the 1983 M*A*S*H finale) saw the Saints beat the Colts, which means the stakes are high for Fox Sports. To capture all the drama, on and off the field, the network is deploying more than 400 personnel and 50 state-of-the-art cameras — both about three times more than for a regular season game — and Rich Russo, one of the top game directors in the business. Here, the 10-time Sports Emmy Award–winner breaks down the game plan.

How exactly do you prepare for a game of this magnitude?
We do rehearsals. We have two local high school football teams come in on Friday to get the cameras and technical people ready for the show. We go through various looks — three-receiver sets, four-receiver sets, two-tight-end sets — just to make sure we have all our assignments and patterns correct and that the cameras have their isolations down. We try to mimic the game and the teams playing. Like if a team runs a lot of no-huddle plays and is quick to the line, we’ll work on that. We’ll rehearse the national anthem, the coin toss, halftime, the postgame trophy presentation, everything.

So you have these high school kids singing the national anthem?
No, whoever is singing the national anthem will be there. We’ll even rehearse team intros, bringing the high school teams through the tunnel and onto the field, to get the timing down. It’s a two-hour walk-through.

What’s the biggest difference between televising the Super Bowl and a regular-season game?
The number of cameras. At a regular game, we’ll have 13 or 14, but at the Super Bowl, when we have 50, we’ll have shots of the goal lines and sidelines we wouldn’t normally have. It’s the biggest game, so you want to have definitive looks of every play.

What’s your most vital weapon in that respect?
Probably the X-Mo — a super-, superslow-motion camera. It shoots 500 frames per second and gives that NFL Films type of look. If there’s a running back who has been fumbling, we’ll use the X-Mo so you can see his hands right on the ball. If you look at the last Super Bowl that Fox covered, in 2008, when the Giants’s David Tyree had that catch at the end, an extra X-Mo camera on the reverse side of the field was able to capture dramatic shots of that play. That alone was worth everything.

What differentiates Fox’s coverage of the Super Bowl from that of other networks?
A signature of ours is subtleties. We’re constantly looking for subtle reactions on the field and on the sidelines. The obvious reaction is the guy who dances in front of the camera. We’re about what’s not obvious — the emotion, the faces. Some of our cameras will get in tight on the quarterback’s eyes so you see him looking one way, then looking off the other.

How will you capture the sounds of the game?
You always want to hear the quarterback’s cadence, but the players aren’t mic’d. In the past we picked up their cadence through the umpire’s mic, but the umpire moved position this season from the defensive side to behind the quarterback, which somewhat limits the audio. So we’re going to see if we can pick up audio elsewhere, like from the parabolic mics on the sidelines.

What’s your biggest fear?
The uncertainty — the things you can’t control from the outside. For example, we were doing the Giants–Cowboys game this season when the lights went out. Our trucks went out — everything lost power. We just barely got back on the air before play resumed. And obviously you can’t control the game itself: If there’s a blowout, you still have to perform the same as you would in a tight game.

Do you have any pregame rituals?
I walk two laps around the field three hours before every game.

How much can you map out the broadcast ahead of time?
I’ll have a game plan going in, but the announcers — Troy Aikman and Joe Buck — drive the ship. Our job is supporting them. It’s important that we’re able to react to what they’re saying. Richie Zyontz, our producer who runs all the replays, and I will bounce ideas off each other, but hopefully we’re thinking what the announcers are thinking. Bottom line, it’s about the game.

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This article originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.

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