The NFL playoffs have reached the divisional round, and after this weekend, only three games will be left in the season.
With the intensity focused on every postseason snap, it’s easy to forget that just weeks ago, Scott Hanson and his team at NFL RedZone were wrangling nearly a dozen games every Sunday, giving viewers real-time updates on the happenings in every contest across the country.
This week on “The Athletic Show,” Jason Goff takes viewers behind the scenes of the most frenetic show on television and learns how the man behind the podium manages to think faster and know more than almost every football fan on the planet.
“I am terrified to get caught with my pants down, so I am going to study and memorize, and know everything I possibly can going into an NFL Sunday,” says Hanson, RedZone’s host for the last 17 years. “I have to saturate my brain with everything I can possibly think of.”
Hanson’s weekly saturation begins the moment he finishes the latest broadcast, ending one Sunday shift with preparation for the next. While watching Sunday Night Football, he’s also eyeing NFL Network, ESPN and any other highlight show he can to find interesting facts and stats that he can cite the following weekend.
Tuesday, he gets his dossier — a research packet between 100 and 200 pages long containing the most up-to-date information on the upcoming games, players, stadiums, owners and historical records.
Next, it’s spreadsheet time.
“I like to do most of them myself, like a chef putting his fingers in the dough so you know what it is,” Hanson says. “I kind of look at it like a tool belt for a contractor who gets called to someone’s home. And they might not know what the problem is — it could be plumbing or electrical or drywall. But you show up to the house, and the homeowner goes, ‘OK, the problem is this.’ If you’ve mastered your tool belt, you’re comfortable. You can say, ‘OK, that will require this, that and this other thing.’ The facts, stats, numbers, all of that information, are the tools that I’ll use to try to plug in based on what the football presents us on an NFL Sunday.”
In this episode, we join the RedZone crew starting at 6:15 a.m. to observe the marathon they experience every Sunday during the NFL season. Hanson shares his tips for being on the air for 12 straight hours, including when to eat, what not to drink, and the breakfast item that holds the key to success. He also explains how the show pulls together hundreds of moving parts to create an experience akin to an NFL symphony.
“We are an orchestra that plays jazz music,” Hanson says. “So you need to be sweet and sharp with your own instrument, but you need to be listening to and watching your teammates to try and work your skills in with their skills to hopefully make a beautiful piece of music.”
Speaking of the intersection of NFL and pop culture, this week’s episode of “The Athletic Show” also includes the hosts ranking the best football movies of all time and analysis of one of the wildest NFL coaching carousels in recent memory.
You can watch “The Athletic Show” on Fire TV and wherever you get your podcasts.