So I’m sitting here watching Denver Broncos vs Carolina Panthers on TV and something came to mind… The announcers seem to have an endless supply of information. They not only call the play by play, but they seem to know everything about every player, history and all. They also seem to know everything about every team. They never run out of things to say. Do the announcers have someone feeding them information, or do they just know it all?
Yes. They have an earphone that feeds them information when they need it. One of the things they have to learn is to keep talking while the information is being fed to them.
This doesn’t mean they need help with everything. But when they come up with an obscure statistic, you can bet someone had fed it to them.
They also tend to have highly-advanced, turbocharged interweb machines in front of them these days.
Of course they do just like news anchors don’t know everything that is going on in the world personally. They have a whole staff of sports statisticians, pre-prepared biography tidbits and lots of other information being fed to them through monitors and headsets constantly. The job isn’t to memorize every little factoid. They are paid to give voice commentary using that information and provide some real-time game analysis although, if you pay close attention, most of the latter is completely devoid of any real content.
John Madden, perhaps the most famous announcer of all time, could go on for hours without saying anything of substance. Most of it just boiled down to the fact that the team that is down needs to score more points in order to win. It isn’t a job that just anyone can do but the fundamentals are to have a good TV presence and a firm understanding of the rules of the game.
They have spotters who are watching for the nitty-gritty information such as which number was involved in a play, and of course sheets of information on hand (or perhaps some are to iPads now) and are just skilled at checking them quickly for those “top of mind” tidbits about each player’s basic stats.
And, yeah, they cram too.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Yep, all of the above and then some.
Basically, the play-by-play announcer sticks mostly to calling the game while the colour man is responsible for filling all the dead airtime between plays.
Remember, these guys have played and/or been around sports their whole lives and spend all their time either talking, researching, watching, interviewing players, etc…
They also have player sheets, stats, histories, records, trivia, compiled before the game by themselves or the crew.
Or they are Vin Scully, who has 60 years of stats and stories in his brain. Plus a good stats guy in the truck.
I don’t know about football, but baseball announcers keep their own scorecards, and that can give you a lot of detail about the current game, no outside help needed.
You don’t need statisticians on the headset to tell you that Pujols walked on his first at-bat in the first, and grounded into a fielder’s choice in the third. Or that this is the third pitcher after the starter was knocked out in the 5th. Or that first pitch was at 6:17pm.
The “statisticians” are usually feeding them bullshit stats like “batting average against the Cubs bullpen with runners in scoring position in the 8th inning since 2012”.
Back in the mid 90’s I worked at a restaurant that was frequented by Bob Costas, yes that Bob Costas. Yes he is much shorter than you think.
Whether he was with a group at an 8-top or with a few at a 4-top he always had an associate eating alone at a one top. this was a pretty good, and at the time, a very trendy Modern Italian place in Clayton MO.
The “Lone Wolf” Bob always brought in was his personal statistician, mind you I said personal, not from NBC or any other sports news outlets. He had dinner alone and compiled stats and trivia most of the evenings. He searched text and crunched numbers
Yes, sportscasters have support crews.
/csb
Outside of Aleppo. :rolleyes:
I think a lot of people are shortchanging sports announcers here. There may be some exceptions, but most football play by play and color commentators spend long, long hours researching their matchups and developing in-game talking points. So yeah, they may have someone talking in their ear, they may have laptops in front of them during the game, but if you notice, many rarely make mistakes. Most announcers don’t do what they do without an awful lot of study and prep work.
As for baseball, hockey and basketball announcers yes they do the prep work but at the same time they broadcast so many games during a season its much easier to pick up factoids and talking points. But theres still a lot of homework involved.
Moderator Action
Since this is about sports, let’s move it to the Game Room (from GQ).
In the days before the internet each team produced a media guide which was handed out to all of the press. The media guide contained just about everything you’d ever need to know about a team: schedule, detailed bios of players, coaches, and administrators, team history, records, etc. All things ripe for picking out random trivia with which to liberally pepper a broadcast.
They still produce them, though I don’t know if they still actually print them and hand them out; you can check out your team’s guide here.
.
They have a whole host of staff supporting them and not just on game related trivia. They have guys who are experts on politics (thats how in international matches or at the Olympics, the commentators know where exactly a certain city, country, tribe is and a player,teams relation to it) language experts (who tell them how to pronounce names and say the occasional foreign language phrase), medical guys (for information on injuries)
The cricket commentators in England have cake - sent in by listeners.
That’s when they’re not losing it over inadvertent double entendres:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVTpX7LdZQ
What was the double entendre?
ETA: Although that’s funny as hell without even knowing what the joke is.
OK. I see “leg over” is an idiom with which we’re unfamiliar in North America.
Scully is amazing. When a batter steps into the box Scully will tell you stats such as where he was born, where he went to high school, the name of the girl he took to the prom, if he went to college and what his major was, the name of the bar he had his first drink and what the drink was… and on and on and on. I often wonder where he gets these nuggets. The only other announcer I’ve heard who can get away without a color man is probably John Miller.
Just imagine some possible circumstances for which you might well be “getting your leg over”…
To me, it’s more impressive to see the hosts of something like College Gameday, where over 3 hours they discuss in a fair degree of detail about 40 games.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk