As long-time readers of this site know, we often cover scorebug changes. Fox’s NFL scorebug change Sunday was particularly interesting, though, as it didn’t appear to involve any change in the information shown, the typefaces used, or anything other than the location of the scorebug. And that location switched to a point where it wasn’t viewable on many RedZone feeds due to those channels’ own overlays. Here’s more on that from Timothy Burke:
So Fox did indeed move its score box down 40 pixels for the late games, presumably to discourage viewing on NFL RedZone. I'm surprised it took this long for the networks to take some kind of action to protect their doubleheader national games. pic.twitter.com/M7DEPUgFd7
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) September 26, 2021
This is what that change looked like for viewers watching NFL Red Zone. As you can see, the clock, playclock, and down and distance are all missing which as you can imagine is no ideal!
https://twitter.com/JordanHeckFF/status/1442260489229144064
There are plenty of tweets indicating that this showed up in an interfering way on the NFL Network-provided NFL RedZone (with Scott Hanson). At this point, it’s unclear if it also affected the DirecTV Sunday Ticket RedZone channel (with Andrew Siciliano). At any rate, this led to the NFL RedZone crew overlaying their own scorebug:
NFL Redzone production crew has gotten so fed up with Fox’s scorebug not being overscan compliant that they are manually overlaying their own. pic.twitter.com/ZRXe7RalO6
— PodKATT (@valleyshook) September 26, 2021
It’s certainly interesting to see this kind of change between a network’s early and late games, and to see a RedZone channel respond by making their own scorebug. The idea of moving a scorebug down to interfere with other broadcasts of a game seems problematic, but it’s interesting that there was already a deployable counter to it. At any rate, this certainly made for some notable scorebug discussion.
[Timothy Burke and PodKATT on Twitter]
