How Fox Brings NFL “Bummage” to TV Screens—Even During the Super Bowl
“Bummage” lets viewers see the emotion (usually misery) of being an NFL player. Here’s how Fox captures those moments—and why they’re so powerful.How Fox Brings NFL “Bummage” to TV Screens—Even During the Super Bowl
“Bummage” lets viewers see the emotion (usually misery) of being an NFL player. Here’s how Fox captures those moments—and why they’re so powerful.
The shot flickered across TVs for only a few seconds, but it was hard to forget. In the first quarter of this year’s NFC championship game, Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Haason Reddick hit San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy’s arm, knocked the ball loose, and ended Purdy’s day as a functional passer.
Fox showed two replays of the hit, then a heartbreaking image: a close-up of Purdy’s face. The video played in slow motion. Purdy blinked his eyes and exhaled, as if he knew his team’s day of hell was just starting.
On TV, a shot of a football player who looks miserable has a name: bummage. Bummage is a term that has been kicked around in broadcasting for years, but it has a strange power in the age of the 4K TV. The shot looks old-fashioned and cinematic, like Jack Lambert glaring across the line of scrimmage on NFL Films.
Bummage shows up in just about every broadcast produced by Fox’s lead NFL crew. During the NFC title game, viewers saw chewing gum fly out of Eagles coach Nick Sirianni’s mouth in slow motion when his team failed to snap the ball before the play clock ran out. Jimmie Ward, a 49ers defensive back, put a hand on each side of his helmet after committing a penalty that kept an Eagles touchdown drive alive.
In the first round of playoffs, the Fox crew snagged a close-up of Darius Slayton, a Giants wide receiver, hanging his head after he dropped a pass that could have helped them beat the Vikings. Later, when Kirk Cousins’s checkdown pass let Slayton off the hook, Cousins was shown enduring, well, a more private form of agony. He looked like he’d forgotten to answer an email at work.
Last month, during the Cowboys-49ers divisional game, I was sitting in the Fox truck outside Levi’s Stadium when the crew harvested a choice piece of bummage. Dak Prescott had thrown an interception—a bad one.
Richie Zyontz, Fox’s producer, scanned a bank of monitors at his left. He sounded like an air force pilot as he called out:
“C!”
“X is next!”
“Delta!”
“And then Green!”
Each term corresponds to a feed that shows replays Zyontz can use on the broadcast. Rich Russo, the director, repeated Zyontz’s words, and Colby Bourgeois, the technical director, punched up the images. A few seconds later, 45 million viewers saw the bummage: a close-up of Prescott looking dazed.
NFL games occupy a funny place in American pop culture. They’re watched by more people than any other live TV programming. Yet their artistic qualities go largely unscrutinized. Viewers get mad at the announcers or nod at a well-chosen piece of bumper music. Meanwhile, Zyontz and Russo are choosing hundreds of shots—they call them “pictures”—that wash over the audience, like a subliminal form of art.
Bummage is just one type of picture. But it’s a really interesting one. It’s a TV camera trying to peer inside a player’s helmet and personalize an impersonal game. Bummage is at the heart of the debates about how the networks cover pro football. It even explains a little about what makes Zyontz, the man who will produce the Super Bowl, unique.
For a guy who will command an audience of 100 million on Sunday, Zyontz hardly cuts the figure of a celebrity showrunner. A skinny, soft-spoken man, Zyontz has been Fox’s lead NFL producer since 2002. Sunday’s game will be his seventh Super Bowl as lead producer. Yet Zyontz has an allergy to grand pronouncements. Unlike some producers, he doesn’t cultivate an air of mystique. “Whenever you take a picture of the crew, where’s Richie?” said Matt Millen, who worked with him as an announcer at Fox and CBS. “He’s hiding in the back.”
Zyontz was born in New York City in 1957 and raised as a die-hard sports fan. He was in the upper deck of Madison Square Garden when Willis Reed limped onto the floor before Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals. Zyontz took a job as a security guard at CBS in 1979 and later joined John Madden’s NFL crew. He learned the fine points of covering football from Madden. When the crew’s attention wandered during a game, Madden would joke, “Just give me three hours.”
As a producer, Zyontz—whom almost everyone calls “Z”—has a number of duties. He coaches the announcers when they need it. He makes sure Fox broadcasts contain instructions on how to win Terry Bradshaw’s money. In the truck, he maintains a Zen-like presence. “I think his resting heart rate is 61 beats per minute, and it just stays that way the entire time as all hell breaks loose on the field,” said Fox announcer Kevin Burkhardt.
During games, Zyontz and Russo have different jobs. Russo picks the live-action shots, while Zyontz chooses the replays and watches over the rest of the broadcast.
This is what makes Zyontz’s job interesting. He has very defined ideas about how a game ought to look and sound. But much of his work is reactive. Ask him what he plans to do on third down, and he’ll say: Tell me what happens first.
Zyontz’s great skill is an ability to hold several hypothetical artistic visions in his head at the same time: one for if a wide receiver catches a pass, another if the receiver drops it, and still another if a cornerback intercepts the ball. Artie Kempner, a Fox director, called Zyontz “the ultimate sports-production chess player.” After Prescott’s interception against the 49ers, Zyontz exclaimed, “Wow, who expected that?” He had already ordered up four replays.
Zyontz got interested in slow-motion close-ups in 1984. As a CBS underling, he helped put together lead-ins for the NBA Finals, which featured the Celtics and Lakers that year. Zyontz pulled close-ups of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird from the tapes. And when he slowed down the shots, he found that they took on an interesting quality. They helped the audience feel something of what it was like to be on the floor with Magic and Larry.
When CBS lost the NFL rights in 1994, Zyontz moved to Fox. Eight years later, he became Fox’s lead NFL producer, and with numerous additional cameras at his disposal, he started using those tight close-ups during games, capturing a player’s face right after a play. “It’s about emotion,” said Fred Gaudelli, who produced Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. “We all go for it in our games. But no one does it better than they do.”
In the last decade, the increasing sophistication of high-speed cameras has made finding great close-ups even easier. Now, you see bummage in other sports, too. When Christian Pulisic missed a point-blank shot against the Netherlands in the World Cup, a slow-motion replay showed him with mouth agape.
Zyontz and his crew are particular about their close-ups. They show plenty of pictures of happy football players. But as Russo explained in a pregame meeting with his camera operators, “A better picture is usually a negative picture.” And not an obvious one.
The best close-ups come when their cameras catch players unaware. During the Minnesota–New York wild-card game, the crew snagged a marvelous shot of Dexter Lawrence, the Giants defensive tackle, after he’d been held by a Vikings lineman. Lawrence winked. He knew he was unblockable.
A nice piece of bummage can turn an instant replay into a story. When Purdy got hurt in the NFC title game, the Niners’ fourth-string quarterback, Josh Johnson, came in. Johnson dropped a snap late in the second quarter. The Eagles recovered the ball and, four plays later, scored a touchdown.
Zyontz barked out a sequence of three replays. The first was the Johnson fumble. The second was Eagles running back Boston Scott racing into the end zone. Then came the bummage: a close-up of Johnson being consoled on the sideline.
“I always feel it’s a little capper to the mini-story we just told in 10 seconds,” said Zyontz. “What happened? Who did it? It’s the exclamation point, the picture that tells the story.”
Getting bummage onto America’s TV screens requires at least three people. First, a camera operator has to shoot it. Fox’s bummage hunters tend to have cameras that are stationed 7 to 8 feet high—high enough for them to see over players’ heads, yet low enough to look inside their helmets. “Head and shoulders—anybody can do that,” said Mario Zecca, a Fox sideline camera operator. “I want to get in the grill and see what’s going on there.”
I met Zecca inside Levi’s Stadium the day before the Cowboys-49ers game. He rides on a cart that travels up and down the sidelines during games. And for a time, he was annoyed that Zyontz wasn’t using more of his action shots. Then Zyontz explained that the folks at home tend to remember the tight, emotional pictures—pictures they see again in SportsCenter highlights. Zecca began searching for those pictures as a point of pride. “I always seem to go for the defensive back if he gets burned or the guy who committed a penalty during a drive,” he said. Zecca was the one who found Prescott’s face after the interception.
Later, I met Zecca’s colleague Andy Mitchell, who was wearing an Eagles cap. Mitchell operates a low camera in the end zone, and he believes the best bummage is found on the faces of defenders. “Offense is business,” he said. “Defense is emotional.”
Zecca and Mitchell are expected to point their cameras at certain spots on the field depending on the game situation. (Zecca, for instance, monitors the line of scrimmage when the ball is on the goal line.) But Zyontz and Russo have given them license to follow their instincts, to search for the face of the defensive end when he jumps offsides or for Aaron Rodgers when almost anything happens. “You’re always thinking a shot ahead or two shots ahead,” said Mitchell. “What’s really going to be the bummage shot?”
Everything the camerapeople shoot is watched in Fox’s tape truck by replay operators like Paul Duda and Lars Pacheco. When Duda and Pacheco see an interesting face, they perform a TV version of a magic trick.
On the field, a player like Purdy scowls or exhales for a half second—a micro-gesture he might not even remember later. But the footage Duda and Pacheco watch is shot by cameras with high frame rates. That allows the replay operators to slow down a shot while maintaining its clarity. A scowl that’s rendered in slow motion becomes memorable. When the shot plays on Fox, a scowl can last four or five seconds.
When Duda and Pacheco find a good piece of bummage, they become like floor traders at the New York Stock Exchange. They get on their headsets to try to sell Zyontz on using the shot on TV. “React on O!” they say, referring to one of the feeds Zyontz can see in his truck. Or: “React on X!” Both Duda and Pacheco have worked on Fox’s “A” crew for more than 20 years. Zyontz can judge the quality of a shot by the urgency in their voices.
The final decision on what pictures get broadcast belongs to Zyontz. He must act quickly, relying on the replay operators’ lobbying, the footage he sees on his monitors, and, most of all, his instincts. Everyone on the crew operates on instinct.
I asked Zyontz how long he has after a play ends to pick a replay.
“You need to have a plan within five seconds,” he said.
That’s not much time to make an artistic choice that millions of people are going to see, I said.
Zyontz amended his answer. “Three seconds,” he said. “It feels like three seconds to me.”
Sports TV producers don’t have as many subreddits devoted to their art as the makers of The Last of Us. But if you watch closely, around the fringes, you can see they have different ideas about how football should be covered.
Every football broadcast has two main components. One is analysis. This is when Greg Olsen or Troy Aikman or Cris Collinsworth or (if he’s not dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth) Tony Romo explains why a play happened. Analysis might be enhanced by a Telestrator or a tight shot of a defensive end setting the edge. It tells viewers how football works.
The other component is emotion. It tells viewers how football feels. This is the shot of Joseph Ossai, the Bengal who committed a late penalty against Patrick Mahomes in the AFC title game, wearing his helmet on the bench after the Chiefs kicked the winning field goal. This is Purdy realizing his arm doesn’t work anymore. This is bummage.
The best NFL broadcasts of the last two decades have been Zyontz’s Sunday afternoon games on Fox and Gaudelli’s Sunday night games on NBC. (Gaudelli switched to Thursdays this season.) Zyontz and Gaudelli weigh the balance between analysis and emotion a little differently.
“I’m more analytical,” Gaudelli told me. Sunday Night Football surfed off (and helped create) a period in which football fans were learning about schemes and advanced stats and wanted someone like Collinsworth to teach them even more.
Zyontz, of course, wants his broadcast to teach viewers something about football, just as Gaudelli wouldn’t forsake emotion. But Zyontz is also tugging his broadcast back toward feelings, toward the visceral, toward the face of Lambert—tugging it toward the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Zyontz’s games are “more like watching a movie,” said Gaudelli.
Zyontz, even though he has used the word “cinematic” himself, shuddered slightly at the thought. “Boy, Madden would go through the roof if he ever heard that word,” he said. But bummage isn’t really an auteur’s signature shot. It’s a reminder, in the age of sports betting and all-22 film, that football is played by humans. There’s an anguished face that goes with every dropped pass and torn ulnar collateral ligament.
When you watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, you’ll notice that Burkhardt and Olsen won’t say much during Zyontz’s close-ups. Bummage speaks for itself. Sometimes, Zyontz will tell his announcers, “This is just a picture. It’s just a pretty picture.”
