The story of Super Bowl LIX is in the cards.
And by cards, think of a large sheet of heavy-stock paper loaded with information — player names, numbers, statistics and sometimes annotated trivia — always within reach of the broadcasters calling the game.
They’re called “boards” and they’re usually created from scratch by the play-by-play announcers and color analysts in the days leading up to a game, a meticulously organized study sheet that provides a commentator with detailed information in a pinch.
Fox is broadcasting Sunday’s game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, and although the network will offer every conceivable camera angle, not one of the more than 100 million viewers will get a clear glimpse of the boards used in the booth by Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady.
Exactly what those boards look like is unclear because Fox did not make Sunday’s game announcers available to The Times.
But it’s likely that their boards are similar to those of other Super Bowl announcers, who rely on the sheets as more safety net than script.
“None of it is read,” said legendary CBS play-by-play man Jim Nantz, who has worked seven Super Bowls, including the most recent one in New Orleans when Baltimore beat San Francisco. “You don’t read your broadcast. They’re little reminders.
“During a commercial, I’ll go back and look just to see if there’s anything that might steer me toward a story line should this next series of plays lead me there — oh yeah, I want to get this in.”
Like his game calls, Nantz is steeped in nostalgia. So at his home in Pebble Beach he keeps the boards from every football and basketball game he has ever called, all neatly organized even though some might have ring-shaped coffee stains or maybe a smudge of ketchup from his halftime hot dog. He has called 502 NFL games, including last month’s AFC championship between Kansas City and Buffalo.
“It’s like having every term paper, every piece of homework that you accumulate from first through 12th grade and in college,” he said. “I have them all in order, their own stack based on each year. They look fresh and crisp, mint condition like I’d just put them together a few hours earlier.”
Read more: Dick Vermeil, who coached Eagles and Chiefs, says Super Bowl LIX will be one for ages
Some boards are neater than others. Troy Aikman’s handwriting, for instance, is so precise it almost looks like calligraphy. And Dick Vermeil’s boards? They were suitable for framing.
“If there was a Michelangelo of boards, it was Dick,” said Fred Gaudelli, longtime producer of "Sunday Night Football." “They were like works of art.”
Vermeil’s boards were as colorful as a Bourbon Street king cake. First, they featured the team colors — so the Eagles would be in green — then last season’s stats were in red, this season’s stats were in black, and blue for career stats. Academic stats were written in purple, and injury status was in pink. Filling out a board would take him an entire day.
Whereas Nantz built every board from scratch at the start of a week, Vermeil would use small pieces of white tape to cover outdated stats, and write on that to update them. What’s more, he would have one smaller board for every team in the league — say one for the Eagles, one for the Chiefs — then conjoin those two halves when those teams were playing each other. It was all about efficiency for him.
“I think there are a lot of people still using them, because I gave them out to anybody who ever asked for them,” Vermeil said. “I had them printed off at about 100 at a time.”
Joe Buck’s first Super Bowl board was written in blue — as in, blue language. He wrote a cruder version of “Forget it” all over his first one just to remind himself not to get too serious and that it was only a game, even if the whole country was tuned in.
“I started to get a little cleaner with my personal reminders just because I would end up inevitably just giving the board to somebody,” said Buck, now play-by-play man for "Monday Night Football." “If it’s to some school auction, I don’t want '[forget] it' written on there.”
NBC’s Mike Tirico doesn’t use paper for his boards anymore, but instead relies on a digital tablet that allows him to scroll to any information he needs. He has a backup tablet, too, just in case one goes dark.
But back when he was using paper, he would type the information and go to a nearby copying store to have his boards printed on card stock. If he was working in an open-air press box and there was a threat of rain, he would take the extra step of having the boards laminated.
Once, his ornate spreadsheet sparked the curiosity of a person asked to print it.
“He looked at me and said, `Are you some sort of a high-end gambler or something?’” asked the guy working the copier. “I said, `Nah, I’m just a nerd. I like to follow the game closely.’ After they saw me five or six times they kind of figured out I must have had something to do with the broadcast.”
Nobody is more experienced at calling ballgames than Al Michaels — Do you believe in sphericals? — but he doesn’t construct his own boards. He relies on “Malibu” Kelly Hayes, who has been his spotter for every football game since 1978.
(A spotter uses a different board than the announcer and acts as another set of eyes, standing next to the person on air and, on a given play, tapping names to identify, say, the intended receiver, a defender who knocked the ball away and the defensive end pressuring the quarterback.)
“I have access to other forms of information that will come to me either by talking to our research team, I can go back and forth with them in the middle of a game, and also I have other printed material I can get to if I need to,” said Michaels, a fixture for four decades on variously Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights.
“So on the board it’s essentials. Where a guy went to school. What year he is in the league. Height and weight, and maybe a certain highlight in his career. You can’t put too much on there, because for the most part, for Kelly, it’s pointing out who made the tackle, who created a fumble, the guys who are coming in and out of the game. ... We’ve kind of thinned it out to the essentials. There’s not a lot of time to look at it and read a lot of the information that’s on there.”
Curt Menefee, Fox studio host, had a rudimentary method in his early days as an NFL Europe play-by-play announcer.
Read more: Tom Brady played in 10 Super Bowls. The road to first one as a broadcaster has been challenging
“I showed up in Amsterdam, and I literally had a brown paper bag that I had torn in half and opened up and just kind of wrote names and numbers on that,” he said. “[Color analyst] Brian Baldinger said, `You know that’s not how it works, right?’ It was a process, but I started off from scratch.”
Former NFL running back Daryl Johnston, a Fox color analyst, knows how to put a good board together.
But once… fumble!
“I was doing a Giants game and we were staying at the W in Hoboken,” he said. “We went down for breakfast and I put my board off to the left side and left it. Got up, paid the bill, went out, got in the car and drove all the way out to the stadium. I had to have a runner go all the way back, crossing my fingers that it was there.
“I’ve left them at home one time and had to have my wife FedEx it.”
For some, that’s the stuff of nightmares.
“I guard my boards very carefully,” Nantz said. “It’s like, my phone, my wallet, my Rolex watch and my football boards. They’re under full protection. And not necessarily in that order.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
