A promo image for a "The Simpsons" alternate MNF broadcast on Dec. 9, 2024. A promo image for a “The Simpsons” alternate MNF broadcast on Dec. 9, 2024. (ESPN.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

Speaking of ESPN talent, a lot of them have been involved in various ways. Media saw a preview clip of Homer appearing as a ManningCast guest, with animated versions of Peyton and Eli Manning breaking down the famed Season 9, Episode 24 (“Lost Our Lisa”) clip where Homer gets repeatedly injured in a runaway cherrypicker. There was also a preview clip of an animated Stephen A. Smith roasting Homer’s dream in a lengthy rant, which Selman said Smith did in one take. ESPN’s Szykowny said they’ve brought together an incredible amount of Simpsons figures, ESPN figures, and beyond to make this altcast special.

“There was a lot of late-night hours and a lot of late-night phone calls and back-and-forths in the early stuff and talking with so many people,” he said. “Ultimately, we do have 30 Simpsons characters that are going to be involved. The Simpsons people have created seven new minutes of animation that you will never see anywhere else except during this game. That itself to me is gold. And there’s a bunch of other crazy stuff, including our own ESPN talent. Drew Carter is going to be doing the game with Dan and Mina, and they’ve been wonderful.”

Selman said getting Kimes on board to call this, and learning of her long-running Simpsons fandom, was huge for him.

“I am amazed to find out that Mina Kimes is a Simpsons nerd. That’s a big win.”

Syzkowny said a major change from last year’s Toy Story altcast is the way they can put the commentators in the game.

“After Toy Story last year, we moved to where we have the talent actually calling the game and immersed in the game wearing a Meta Pro VR headset. There are a few experiences — even just yesterday when we started getting in the control room and people who have been on the project who haven’t been on it before — they go over and put the headset on, and it’s like, ‘Damn.’ It feels so real to the scene.

ESPN vice-president (production) Phil Orlins said inserting commentators like that should add a new dimension to this broadcast.

“We can actually take an immersed Dan Orlovsky and drop him right on to the field with the replay and have him stand next to the quarterback and see him there, and he feels like he’s looking at Cooper Rush or whoever it is, Joe Burrow, and talking about seeing what he is seeing and talking about what he is seeing. The potential and capability of that technology and our ability to immerse the talent fully in the scene has really opened up a lot of doors for us.”

Szykowny said that setup sounds challenging for broadcasters at first, but it’s worked remarkably well in test runs.

“Once you’re in that VR headset, I can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had with Mina, Dan, and Drew Carter, like, ‘How will I know when the other person wants to talk if we’re not going to be — if we’re going to be isolated in a VR headset?

“It’s, like, you’re going to think — Dan, you’re going to think that Drew is two feet to your left, and you’re going to think that Mina is two feet to your right as an animated Simpsons character. You’re going to be wherever you want to be. You can be on the sideline at Moe’s juice bar. You can be on the middle of the field.”

Szykowny said the move to put the commentators and characters in 3D carried its own challenges, but worked out thanks to the work of ESPN’s in-house team and the support from the Simpsons group.

“We had to recreate them in Simpsons 3D, which was another good leap of faith that we would love to thank the Simpsons for. They’re a 2-D animation show, and they trusted us with creating 3D characters. That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job.”

Selman said being able to bring The Simpsons‘ comedic feel to this broadcast, through the animated and voiced clips from the show’s cast, the work from commentators Drew Carter, Mina Kimes, and Dan Orlovsky, and the guest appearances from other ESPN figures in Simpsons style should help this appeal to fans of the show, not just football fans.

“That’s just another one of the ways that this thing, I think, is going to deliver for the Simpsons fan and for the football fan in a big way. It’s the real voices, the real characters, with original comedy in both our animation and in the NFL football, cool, CGI, realtime data-tracking, AI-stealing animation that it is.”

That animation deserves some discussion. Media on the call saw a demonstration of this from Nicolaas Westerhof, Beyond Sports’ co-founder and chief technology officer, with that demo showcasing how this is built using Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations technology, the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, Beyond’s virtual commentator technology, and more.

Beyond starts this process by using just player-tracking data for location only. They then add perceived movements (throwing a pass, catching a ball, etc), then add skeletal data so players’ limbs look right, and then convert it to characters (with that involving further tweaks; if data from a Joe Burrow pass is used to have an animated Lisa Simpson throw it, Lisa’s arms are shorter, so the ball position needs to be modified). It’s a remarkable thing to see, but Westerhof said it does come with challenges, especially around the real-time aspect.

“It is difficult to do, especially in realtime. There is a whole bunch of different processes going on in the background on our side, data processing processes, mostly machine learning processes. It really needs to be adjusted on the fly, as we don’t know beforehand what character is going to be in what play. So it needs to be very flexible, the system. We spent a lot of time on making it as flexible as possible because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Orlins has been involved in a huge amount of ESPN alternate broadcasts of dramatically-different kinds, from Sunday Night Baseball: StatCast Edition to alternate Home Run Derby feeds to MLB KidsCasts and well beyond. But he said Simpsons Football Funday stands out as the most radical departure from a typical broadcast he’s worked on, and it’s one specifically designed to bring in people who might never watch a NFL game.

“I think this is the most alternate of the alternate broadcasts, if that makes any sense at all. Most of what we’re doing is finding a different way to reach fans of a game. To me, this is the true alternative because we are really—we’re not just treating the game, or wrapping it with an alteration. We’re actually recreating the game in a truly alternative universe.

“By design, when we do that, we’re now explicitly pursuing the interest of fans who may not want to watch the game in the conventional manner. And I think it’s really important.

“All the alternatives we do engage people. We keep them longer. We find a few—we find some new viewers. It’s always very hard to identify exactly how many of those viewers are actually new viewers, and how many are going to hit the game in a different manner.

“Whereas this is truly the alternative—whether it’s Toy Story, where we’re maybe pursuing preteens co-viewing with their parents or this where we’re maybe looking at parents and teens co-viewing, we’re really pushing for a different group of viewers.”

Orlins said he thinks that’s a vital goal for ESPN and the NFL, especially considering the often-discussed lower viewership numbers for entire games amongst younger demographics at the moment.

“It’s really important to the sport as well. We all would love for young people to start engaging and watching sporting events in their entirety in their preteen years, but we know how realistically challenging it is nowadays with all the forms of media that are out there. So to have a way to get younger or different viewers to really want to engage for a full game or a substantial part of the game is really a lofty, lofty goal. And I think these are designed to attack that in a way that no other altcast does.”

And Selman said the Simpsons team approached this broadcast as telling a full story, with the idea of getting fans to tune in for the full game.

“We try to think of everything from a point of view of story and character, right? Even though it’s a sports game and we can’t control what happens and we can’t control a lot of it, we wanted to make sure that this altcast, this crazy situation where the Simpsons characters are playing—are in an NFL game, with a million jokes, in Springfield Atoms Stadium with Kang and Kodos and Krusty and Lisa and Mo and all these different NFL and ESPN celebrities.”

Syzkowny said the ESPN team’s approaching it that way too. And he said they’re emphasizing that full-game story in a way they haven’t done before, even with their other animated broadcasts (Toy Story on the NFL, Big City Greens on the NHL).

“It’s unlike any of the other alt-casts we did,” he said. “One thing I’d love to get across is that everybody watches from start to finish. Because we are telling a story. That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game.

“It really is like a complete story. And the NFL game, this great game, is going to happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises.”

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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