NEW ORLEANS—What do you do when the stats you’re assigned to provide to a broadcast team often relate to one of those broadcasters? That’s one challenge Sportradar content project manager Zach Robinow often faces, especially now that the Fox “A” broadcasting team he works on providing statistical information to now includes Tom Brady. And, as Robinow told AA in a video interview earlier this week, there have been further challenges in finding the right balance there ahead of Super Bowl LIX.
Patrick Mahomes has contributed to some of the particular balance challenges there. The Kansas City Chiefs are set to shoot for their third-straight Super Bowl victory Sunday night when they take on the Philadelphia Eagles. As Robinow told Awful Announcing, many of Mahomes’ recent accomplishments refer to Brady.
“Obviously, a lot of our stats that I give kind of unavoidably end up relating back to Tom Brady these days, especially when you have someone like Patrick Mahomes that you’re writing about,” Robinow said. “I mean, it’s pretty incredible. It’s one of the coolest things, in my opinion, about this Super Bowl. Mahomes is going for all these extraordinary accomplishments, namely three straight Super Bowls, something no one’s ever done.
“And it’s just inevitable so many of the things that I’m providing statistically are ‘Mahomes is the first to do it since Brady,’ or ‘he’s the only one to do it along with Brady,’ or ‘he’s second to Brady in this or that,’ or ‘he’s actually outpacing Brady by X amount at this age.’ I mean, there’s so much that relates back to him. Just those two are kind of in a class of their own when it comes to quarterback greatness.”
Robinow said he thinks the Fox team has actually been restrained in how much they’ve referenced Brady’s past stats, as there are just so many.
“There’s been lots of notes I’ve provided that circle back to Tom Brady. His name is all over the record books, obviously. I think that they have not leaned into that, they haven’t been sort of overly self-referential or navel-gazing about that.”
But Robinow said he’s not sure what the balance will be Sunday, especially as there’s also ties with the pairing of Mahomes and Chiefs’ coach Andy Reid, which relates to many accomplishments Brady and Bill Belichick had together.
“I can’t speak for how they’re gonna approach the Super Bowl in that regard. I think some of it will be inevitable. When you have Mahomes and Reid doing things that only Belichick and Brady have done, you sort of have to talk about it. I mean, it’s hard to ignore. It’s really interesting in that regard.”
How does the Sportradar to booth pipeline actually work? Robinow said it comes with exhaustive pregame preparation.
“Every game that my crew is doing throughout the year, I’m giving them a set of game notes. For the regular season, it’s somewhere between 20 and 30 charts, like 10 to 15 pages of matchup nuggets and insights and historical context. I try to be forward-looking with those notes, what might happen in this game, what records could be set, if so and so does this, here’s a chart you could show. And for the Super Bowl and the playoffs, they kind of get longer and longer and more in-depth.
“I think my Super Bowl notes were 26 pages, something like 55 charts, depending how you count them, maybe even more than that. So you’re really trying to cover all angles, and there’s so much statistical fodder for a game like this.”
Robinow said his research there suggests there could be a lot of potential historical accomplishments this year.
“The way these teams have both been performing leading up to it, they’re doing some pretty historically interesting things. And obviously Mahomes and the Chiefs, what they’re accomplishing on a dynasty basis and then the way they’ve gone about it this year, they’re always in close games, they’re always winning close games. It’s not something that has any precedent.”
Robinow said when it comes to in-game work, his role largely shifts to answering questions.
“In game, I’m there for a few things. Any questions talent has or the director or producer has, or our graphics department has, any questions that anyone who works for Fox has on a statistical basis, I’m there to to look that up for them. I’m also proactively providing anything that I can come up with.”
He said another element of his gameday job is remembering what they have already found.
“And we’ve prepared so many pre-built graphics and charts, and part of it is remembering what we have and when we might be able to use it. There’s so much prepared, and I’m sure we’ll get some good graphics on there, but there’s so much that will get left on the cutting room floor that it’s hard. But it’s just part of it, especially if it’s a close game, you actually kind of end up getting less.”
Robinow added another element, which is figuring out what the perfect way to phrase certain stats is.
“I’m watching what’s happening and I’m trying to remember everything that I’ve provided, everything I know that Fox has on hand. And I’ve been a football fan my whole life and I’m good with numbers and I’ve watched a lot of football, so I have a pretty good sense of something that’s happening, how that might fit in contextually, to kind of dig into that, whether I should dig into that or not, or how can I present this in the best possible angle? You know, do I want to say ‘This is in the Super Bowl era,’ or do I want to say ‘There’s been four guys since the merger,’ or ‘five guys all time’. It’s figuring out the best way to present it the best possible way that that can make a nice graphic for a big audience like this.”
While it’s never easy to see things he worked hard on not make it to the screen, Robinow said the Fox team of director Rich Russo and producer Ritchie Zyontz find a great balance in what they get in.
“It’s cool to see graphics on air from a stats guy’s perspective. And the producer and director at Fox, they’re some of the best in the business, if not the best. And they sort of like to let the game breathe and speak for itself. If it’s down to the wire in a big moment, they’re not going to inundate you with some minutiae.
“If there’s something big, they’re probably going to show you. But they’re not going to clog the screen when the game is speaking for itself. So it’s hard to see some some stuff that I think might be really great get left on the cover room floor, but that is definitely part of the nature of doing this.”
Robinow has been working with Fox’s top announcing teams since 2018. They include Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen, and now Burkhardt and Brady on the booth side. He also works with several different figures behind the scenes. But he says they’ve all been solid to work with, and he’s enjoying growing his rapport with the current team.
“It’s gone great. I came to Sportradar in 2018, and then I think about halfway through that 2018 NFL season, I started working sort of exclusively with the Fox A crew. Back then it was Joe Buck and Troy Aikman and some different folks in the truck, and it’s kind of evolved through a few different talents in the booth and now to its current standpoint. It’s been great, it’s been evolving. We’ve been growing together, and it’s been a really great partnership.
Robinow said each of the announcing teams he’s worked with has required somewhat of a different approach.
“My style of notes that I’m looking for and providing and angles that I’m giving has sort of evolved over the years to fit the the needs and wants of the crew. I definitely listen to the talent in meetings and on air. They ask direct questions, and so we know some of the angles they’re looking for. And I try to provide data to to back up those points, or sometimes refute them, or give them factual ammo to go directions they want to go.”
He said he also personalizes his work to the producer, the director, and the specific game in question.
“The producer and the director, they have certain types of, when we’re talking about graphics, certain types of things that they like to show. And that changes game by game. A Week 12 regular season game we might show you different things than we’re going to show you in the Super Bowl when, you know, it’s obviously a much larger audience, and the average knowledge of that audience might be a little lower.
“I mean, there’s still plenty of diehard football fans watching, obviously, and we’ll have stuff for them. But we need everything to be pretty digestible at a glance for an audience of this size. So it’s all kind of fluid.”
Robinow said while there are a lot of ways to get statistical information at the moment, he thinks the particular data-driven approach from Sportradar stands out.
“Things are more available than they’ve ever been statistically. Anyone can go on Football-Reference, and they have a pretty good site and you can find a lot, but we have more and better data than them. We have all-time Super Bowl play-by-play data at our fingertips, we’ve had to kind of corral that over the years. We didn’t start off with all that data, but we thought that was important to have. A lot of that stuff only goes back to 2000 or 1991 if you’re looking at, you know, regular season or regular and postseason combined, but we’ve managed to get that all in-house all time.
“So we can confidently tell you who’s thrown the most consecutive completions in a Super Bowl, who’s done X, Y, or Z on a play-by-play basis. We can really go all-time with it, which is, pretty cool, Some of the people we have at Sportradar just are so experienced with it and knowing what to look up and how to come it from different angles, then you might be able to get on a Football-Reference.”
