Super Bowl LX Radio Row Super Bowl LX Radio Row at Moscone Center, San Francisco
By Brendon Kleen on

You see everything at Super Bowl Radio Row.

In one corner, media bigwigs and super agents waiting for courtesy chicken wings. In the other, a big Toyota wheeled in as decor. Keegan Michael-Key. Cam Skattebo. Peter the Golden Retriever.

The concept, which Mike Francesa and Chris Russo claim to have invented (let’s give them that), was originally designed as a remote location for radio broadcasters to deliver updates from the Super Bowl site to local listeners nationwide. It evolved into a place programmed almost entirely by league partners.

Nobody needs on-site broadcasters to share the latest from the Super Bowl with them anymore. All events and press conferences are broadcast live. But the Super Bowl is simply too big an event for the industry to skip out on just because the league can disseminate its own news now.

In place of Radio Row, we got Media Row. Broadcasters adapted, shooting live television shows and podcasts from the space. A spitting contest ensued to see who could get the biggest booth and the most showy setup. Any sports content you watched the week of the Super Bowl had the familiar background of some big convention center in the warm-weather city where that year’s Super Bowl was held.

During this period, the sponsored interview took off. Active and retired NFL stars moved from booth to booth, often decked out in a logoed t-shirt or hat, and sat for a segment of questions. Big sports fans might see the same guest on a half-dozen of their favorite TV shows or podcasts, saying roughly the same thing. Then they cash a check from Old Spice, Pepsi, or another major brand.

But as the industry continued to evolve, so did the Row. The explosion of TikTok ultimately turned every social media platform into a vertical video scroll. A new class of media talent, called creators, descended on Super Bowl week. Sketch, Druski, Deestroying, and Jesser draw larger crowds than the NFL old heads roaming around.

What we have now is effectively Content Row. To feed the digital video maw, every company needs great clips. Around the edges of the Row, college students, fledgling creators, and social media pros are on the prowl for video ideas. If you’re an NFL figure, a recognizable commentator, or any sort of celebrity, you are liable to be grabbed by a young person in business casual with a Rode mic. The questions (and even answers) almost don’t matter. The point of the clip is: Look who I got on video.

Even more bizarrely, the same is basically true of the big dogs. The large booths lining the perimeter of the Row have more elaborate, professional setups but largely play the same game. Bleacher Report, People, DraftKings, no matter. The idea is to get the most famous person possible in front of the camera and tee them up for the most clippable quotes.

The result is hardly an interview. More aptly, a “response.” These people respond to news, to controversies, to viral trends. The product is like an internet Mad Lib: X NFL star weighs in on Y juicy story and calls out Z. A popular example this year was Tom Brady’s resistance to favoring New England in the big game. If you get George Kittle or Kirk Herbstreit to say basically anything about the Brady story, it’s exponentially better than anything you typically get from the social team on a random Wednesday in March.

Of course, there are exceptions. Pat McAfee is always a step ahead of the industry. At the McAfee Show set near the front of this year’s Row, the ESPN host scored hits with the Mayor, the projected No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, and several other exclusives. Rather than begging for responses on stale topics, McAfee used his trusty basketball hoop to raise charity funds and frequently returned to meatier conversation points, such as the atmosphere of the struggling host city.

Out of necessity (reminder: They were banned), Barstool Sports is a huge exception to the rinse-and-repeat churn that comes out of the Row. The Barstool Live setup at Golden Gate Taproom this year was fantastic. With Dave Portnoy and Dan “Big Cat” Katz hosting, Barstool also did not need to rely on the usual tricks for content. The company’s loyal audience filled the venue to the brim each day.

Other standouts adapt the Content Row model to their own needs. Snapback Sports, the popular YouTube and Snapchat-focused sports brand, has turned its trivia station into a Content Row hit. Guests prefer playing a game and letting loose rather than answering the same regurgitated questions or being forced to address more serious topics. The Snapback booth draws a crowd of other credentialed media as well — the only company, aside from the McAfee Show, where I saw this.

The EA Sports booth is similar, with guests playing Madden rather than merely filming clips. Anyone who can make use of the living, breathing Rolodex in town and land a true exclusive will, as always, benefit.

What will win in the next formation of the Row looks more like what I saw from these booths: collaborative content, comfortable guests, and no obvious cash grab. Even when everything is being filmed, people don’t like having cameras shoved in their faces by people they don’t know. And audiences don’t like contrived content.

Viewers can tell the difference. Last year’s experiment by Myles Garrett was the perfect illustration. Garrett tried to work the Row to amplify his trade demand out of Cleveland. It ended poorly not only for him and his representatives but also for everyone watching the content. Any host or producer on the Row would have been crazy to shoot Garrett down. A generational defensive star asking for a trade? Every interview became legitimate news.

But within hours, sports fans scrolling through their feeds or watching their favorite shows had to be exhausted. Garrett was clearly pulling a stunt. The audience, or at least the hosts of their favorite shows, were being used. Nothing Garrett said materialized into anything besides internal drama in Cleveland. The clip factory on Content Row had come up against its match.

Nobody was so brazen this year in San Francisco, but the Row is already evolving. If the entire sports media industry is going to decamp around the Super Bowl each February, we should at least try harder to deliver for the audience and advance the sports world. The diminishing returns on posting the eighth clip of an Achilles-less Kittle on an Old Spice scooter are already clear.

About Brendon Kleen

Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.

View all posts by Brendon Kleen