I visited the Sky Sports studio to watch the NFL – one thing stuck out | NFL | Sport

The NFL playoffs are in full swing, and the divisional round is jam-packed with new and returning teams vying for that Super Bowl trophy. Six games took place in the Wild Card round, with four tense match-ups coming up before the conference championships at the end of January.

Then, the moment we’ve all been waiting on – Super Bowl 60 – is landing at Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco, California. 18 weeks of regular-season football have come and gone, and now fans are focusing on who will snatch the Lombardi trophy this time around. There are many broadcasters showcasing this star-studded event, but one of the main productions in the UK is the Sky Sports team, featuring the likes of Neil Reynolds, Phoebe Schecter, Jason Bell and Ndamukong Suh.

These are the familiar faces we see on screen every weekend, breaking down the plays and watching every nail-biting moment of action from the studios and pitchside. But there is a secret team that makes this all happen – the production crew at Sky, who work to produce the best show possible for viewers.

I took a trip down to Isleworth to visit the vast studios during Wild Card weekend and saw just how the team get to grips with the NFL each season. Upon entering the building, I was greeted and handed a visitor’s pass before going behind the scenes to meet the talent – that’s the group name for Suh, Bell, and Reynolds – and see how they set up for a day of American football.

By 2pm, cameras were already zooming around the studio, planning out parts of the show, from where the programme begins to with in-depth analysis of the upcoming games on their ‘dancefloor.’

The dancefloor stunned me as it’s just LED brackets that can project anything – from your typical Monday night football graphics to the NFL football field we see every weekend from September to February.

I met with senior assistant producer Patrick Crowley, affectionately known as Paddy to his team, and discussed the hard work that goes into producing one of the rising sports in the UK.

Crowley showed off the gallery, which is where all the magic happens. Many TV screens fill this space with colleagues speaking a language foreign to the novice ear. This is where all the graphics, live feeds, and gameplay are transmitted to the team in the studio, and where the producers communicate with the main presenter and their guests throughout the show.

It is a cacophony of voices and flashing screens and could make any sane person overstimulated, but Crowley has plenty of faith in his team. When asked how he would fix a mistake happening live, he said: “Stuff can go wrong as it’s such a big production going on. Things can go wrong, especially when we’re on a site in America. You can be quite reliant on the internet connection. 

“It’s kind of the analogy everyone says with TV is like the duck swimming on water. So everything looks serene at the top, which all the viewer sees, but underneath is just kicking like mad. Something would have to really drastically happen, and that’s never really happened because we’re all so used to what we’re doing.”

Director James Lawson also chimed in on the running of the NFL programme and admitted that a lot of chopping and changing can happen on the day. He said: “I’m at the front calling the cameras. The vision mixer is cutting the cameras, and you don’t know how that’s going to go until you do it. 

“You don’t know when one of the guests is going to start talking about the video that we’ve got prepared to show the viewer at home about some analysis or something like that. 

“So you’re following the chat. You have to listen to what’s being said, and then roll it at the right time. It just keeps you on your toes, and you can’t really plan a break unless let’s say, at the end of the first quarter, we’re definitely going to take an advert break for two minutes.”

One thing that stood out to me the most was the augmented reality that Lawson highlighted during the tour of the studios. First of all, the entire studio is one area with the dancefloor, the seats and the massive screens, so the presenters stick to one area the whole time.

But with all the cameras and overhead lighting, I never noticed that the panel of the stadium that you typically see on the Sky Sports broadcast isn’t actually there. Lawson said: “You will see virtual worlds.

“So it’ll look like the roof of a stadium that’s expanded but that is just a graphic; it’s not real. It’s so clever that basically the cameras know where they are in that augmented reality so when they move, the world does too.”

The Sky Sports studios will run three more weeks of NFL action before it is back to preparing for the 2026 season, and no doubt there will be plenty of drama to catch throughout.

Watch more NFL than ever before this season, with every game in the Playoffs and the Super Bowl live on Sky Sports and NOW.