Mike Pereira has “Ice Cube” workroom at 50 degrees to “keep everyone alert”

One of the more interesting football TV personalities is Fox’s Mike Pereira. Most networks seem to incorporate former officials in some way these days, with varying degrees of success (looking at you, Mike Carey), but when Fox brought in Pereira seven years ago, the idea was rather unconventional. Sam Farmer of The Los Angeles Times has an excellent profile of Pereira, and it includes a fascinating look at what Pereira’s Sunday workspace looks like, which has a lot to do with the temperature:

Beneath his natty three-piece suit, Mike Pereira wears thermal underwear. The millions of football fans who tune in every fall Sunday would have no idea that he’s clomping around in fur-lined UGG boots that are just below the view of the TV camera. His glass-walled workroom at Fox Sports studios, appropriately nicknamed the “Ice Cube,” has the thermostat twisted down to a crisp 50 degrees to combat the hot lights and keep everyone alert.

Without question, Pereira has the coolest job in the NFL.

…Pereira, who lives in Sacramento, flies to Los Angeles each week and spends weekends at the Westside studio. The “Ice Cube” has two long desks lined with 16 large-screen computer monitors, where fellow Fox employees sit and track games. There are six TVs showing the network’s games on one wall. Pereira wears an earpiece and is constantly toggling from game to game to keep up with calls on the field. At his fingertips is a switchboard that allows him to instantly connect with the directors in on-site production trucks. Sometimes, during commercials, he’ll be patched through to the broadcast team in the booth…

People at home might see him as the genial know-it-all at the bar, but really Pereira doesn’t have the luxury of truly watching any game in particular. Often, in the frenetic pace of everything happening around him, he doesn’t know the score or even which team is winning.

“I lose track of which game is which,” he said. “All I try to do is go from play to play to play.”
There’s an orange X on the floor marking his spot for appearing on air, with a remote-control camera perched in the corner of the room. Most of the time, it’s just his voice and a picture of him that shows up during a game, but occasionally he will get up from his swivel chair, sit on the corner of his desk, and deliver a pithy, 20-second monologue on live TV.

While all of this is going on, two Fox employees are monitoring Pereira’s Twitter feed, which has about 300,000 followers. They field questions, then type his responses as tweets. Sometimes, his followers turn to him for answers about the Canadian Football League, baseball, and hockey.

“I can get out of my area of expertise pretty quick,” he said.

Well, that temperature certainly brings a different meaning to “staying frosty.” And if it’s working for Pereira and the rest of the staff, great. Overall, the idea of bringing in knowledgeable rules analysts has been a great one, and Pereira has done an excellent job at Fox; his success (both on the NFL and on college games; the article mentions how he flies down from his home in Sacramento to Fox’s LA studios each weekend) is a big part of why we’re seeing this role expanded across networks. That may or may not have anything to do with the temperature, but hey, at least it means that Pereira can stay cool.