We all had the joy of watching some real winter weather football yesterday with snow up and down the eastern seaboard. Several games were blanketed with snowfall, creating some very cool pictures of how football should be. It even caused some media members to finally realize a winter weather Super Bowl can actually be a good thing and not the end of civilized football as we know it.
The heaviest snow was in Philadelphia for the Lions-Eagles game and Fox did something I've never seen before on a telecast. The snow was so thick, the network actually digitally imposed yard lines on the snow for fans watching the game at home. Here's a close up view that shows the digital enhancements.
Digital graphics are everywhere on football games and they've exploded since the advent of the First and 10 line. Now we have lines for the line of scrimmage, lines for field goal range (although ESPN overdoes it on its college football coverage), boxes that tell us down and distance, and even advertisements. But never an entire football field digitally imposed.
Sure it doesn't quite fit with the football of our ancestors that was played on Sunday, but it's an innovation that unquestionably helped viewers at home know what in the Sam Hill was going on. It was a fantastic innovation that shows the fascinating ways in which technology continues to grow by leaps and bounds and the impact it has on sports telecasts.
Now, if Fox could just find a digital way to keep sideline reporters like Molly McGrath warm…
Molly McGrath, reporting live from the planet Hoth pic.twitter.com/QTwx6wyFo8
— Sporting News (@sportingnews) December 8, 2013
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About Matt Yoder