For 10 years, NFL RedZone has taken football fans on a wild ride, showing them the exciting conclusion to drives across the country. How has the sports television channel changed the way we watch sports?
By Jill Gattens, Brendan Straub & Rachel Veslany
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
It’s a Sunday in October, a few minutes until 1 p.m. You get yourself situated with a can of soda and a bowl of popcorn. Reaching for your pocket, you grab your phone and check your fantasy football rosters to make sure all of your lineups are ready to go for kickoff. You turn on the TV just in time to hear Scott Hanson’s soothing voice say, “7 HOURS OF COMMERCIAL-FREE FOOTBALL STARTS NOW!” as several games in the 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time window kick off the day’s action.
This isn’t a hypothetical: We spent a Sunday in late November glued to NFL RedZone, the 10-year-old sports television channel owned and operated by NFL Network that whips around from game to game to show the most exciting moments (translation: when a team has the ball inside the other team’s 20 yard line and is poised to score). What follows is a description of the roller coaster ride that is watching RedZone — and a look at how the channel has changed fans’ viewing habits.
Listen as the reporters discuss their story on RedZone and what they found.
What is RedZone and why is it so popular? Brendan Straub explains in this motion graphics video.
It doesn’t take long for the action to start: Latavius Murray just scampered in from 26 yards for the New Orleans Saints.
RedZone might be the perfect channel for our times. It shows the most thrilling moments of the country’s most popular sport. It caters to our short attention spans. And, not for nothing, it’s easy to access. Viewers can get RedZone through multiple mediums, including the NFL app or through a cable TV package. Using the NFL app to stream the service costs $5 a month according to FanBuzz. TV packages including RedZone vary in price depending on the company, although several sports streaming services are included on top of RedZone.
Fans wanting to catch all the action in a certain time block used to have to be expert channel surfers. No longer. RedZone does that work for them. If three different games have teams in the red zone, then all three games will be shown at once on the screen.
It’s like clockwork! Three boxes just popped up on the screen as Daniel Carlson splits the uprights for Oakland, Jarvis Landry finds the end zone from 8 yards out for the Cleveland Browns and Atlanta comes out of nowhere and picks off Jameis Winston.
Starting at 1 p.m, fans are able to watch the most exciting parts of each game uninterrupted until the end of the late afternoon games.
“The nonstop action keeps your eyes on the TV at all times,” said Zach Wyatt, a sophomore at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania who watches RedZone.
Hanson, the host of RedZone, takes the viewer from one city to the other in a matter of seconds to watch a pivotal play just in time. The show goes out with a bang, as Hanson leads viewers into a “touchdown montage” that shows every single touchdown from the entirety of the week up until that point.
Pardon the interruption, but The Eagles and Redskins both just knocked in field goals to get on the board.
Through RedZone, football fans spend their Sunday having up to eight games on their TV screen at once, the #octobox, as well as getting fantasy football stats and extended highlights just minutes after they happen. Many football fans are devoted RedZone viewers — they can’t imagine watching games any other way.
But Rachel Veslany, one of the reporters on this story, had never watched RedZone before. We decided to let her witness the chaotic programming for herself. Listen as she explains her experience after watching the first half of the 1 p.m. games.
Veslany is used to watching her favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. She watches football the way many fans watched for decades: intensely focused on one team and mostly tuning out the other games during that time window. But after she watched RedZone, we asked her to watch the second half of a game she cared little about — The Eagles vs. Seattle Seahawks — without interruption to see how she’d respond.
Veslany, like other football fans, picks and chooses what she wants to watch without the chance of interruption. Commercials in the middle of programming have become inconveniences. RedZone is commercial free like iconic streaming services Netflix and Hulu. That means viewers are used to constant action.
“I would say that watching the fast-paced action in RedZone does make the game more enjoyable,” said Drexel University student John Daniels. “It takes away commercials, down time and other distractions that make me want to change the channel.”
The short attention spans of younger generations also helps explain why RedZone is so popular for this demographic, according to Time Magazine.
Holy cow! Malik Turner catches a deep ball from Russell Wilson to give the Seahawks the lead. How about that for attention grabbing!
Many Millennials would rather watch a 30-minute uninterrupted episode of their favorite show than sit through the same episode with commercials on cable TV.
“RedZone doesn’t show ads so it’s hard to look away for even 20 minutes because you miss so much,” Towson University student Luke Tuozzola said.
Many people also watch RedZone for its fantasy football stats. For fantasy players, the overall outcomes of games are not as important as how one specific player plays that week.
Robby Anderson finds the end zone on a back-corner fade pass from Sam Darnold. Anderson’s fantasy owners must be going crazy right now.
Instead of watching only the local game and hoping stats about one’s fantasy players show up, fantasy players are able to watch RedZone and get up-to-the-minute updates on all players/teams playing at that time. People are focusing less on the end result of a game and more on if they made the right decision starting Pittsburgh running back James Conner over Carolina running back Christian McCaffery.
Noah Kline watches RedZone mainly to keep up with his fantasy football team.
“I can root for all my players and have a vested interest in all the games,” Kline said. “It’s a lot more fun to me than watching one game where I may not have a horse in the race.”
In some ways, fantasy sports have become more interesting to sports fans than a full game, according to a New York Times article that looks at how football fans actually watch the sport. Instead of waiting around for action, fans can get RedZone breaking news constantly.
This just in, the GOAT Tom Brady finds N’Keal Harry on a 10-yard pass down the seam in Foxborough. He continues to assert himself as one of the best of all time.
“It’s so much more exciting to watch than other games that might be local to you,” avid RedZone watcher and Towson University student Adam Berger said. “It changes everyone’s perception so it focuses on the players who are really dominating in the league and it tailors to people who want to just see the touchdowns.”
RedZone allows fans to see other games that may not be in their market. For example, it allows people who live in the Baltimore market to see games from Carolina or Seattle that they may not be able to see on cable TV.
“I just enjoy being able to get real-time updates of games that I don’t get in my market,” said Chris Livingston.
Football fans used to watching full games are turning to RedZone, in part because it fits in with their busy schedules. Some people are not able to sit and watch football all day on Sunday due to family time, prior scheduled plans or work. RedZone gives viewers the chance to turn on the channel, view a couple touchdowns and then get back to whatever they were doing without feeling guilty about missing the day’s games.
But, before you go anywhere, Jimmy G finds Deebo Samuel to take a commanding 20-0 lead over the Packers. These Niners look unstoppable in 2019.
“It’s just a lot of fun to watch if you only have a little time and you can’t spend three hours watching a football game,” said David Vatz, Towson University’s director of athletic communications.
Livingston, an avid Ravens fan, finds time to watch RedZone at least once on a Sunday afternoon.
“Every Sunday after the Ravens game, I usually watch in the 4 p.m. slate of games,” Livingston said. “Regardless, I usually watch it at least once.”
For Larry Gattens, the father of group member Jill Gattens, and for Vatz, RedZone has changed the way they watch football games on Sundays.
If his favorite team, the Oakland Raiders aren’t playing, Gattens won’t watch a random game from start to finish that he has no investment in. Now, he’s used to the quick blurbs of action that RedZone provides.
“Considering most of the games are very low-scoring affairs to start, instead of watching one boring game, I can watch 10 boring games,” Gattens said.
Vatz said he will always watch the Baltimore Ravens, but Red Zone allows him to be interested at any time when he turns it on.
“I will always watch a Ravens game because they’re my team, they’re my favorite people,” Vatz said. “But unless there’s something else drawn me to another game, I’m not really that interested and there’s only so much time you have in a day and the Red Zone kind of gives you that time back.”
By the way, the surging Titans just found the end zone again as Ryan Tannehill trots in from 21 yards out. Anyone rooting for the Titans will be happy about that one.
Would RedZone work with another professional sport? There are other sports packages, such as MLB Extra Innings or NHL Center Ice, but those are for providing out-of-market games. For these programs, there is no host or bouncing from game to game. It allows fans to watch the games that they would not normally get because they are out of market. On the MLB and NHL Networks, there are segments on their evening shows that provide wrap-around coverage of live games but nothing that compares to RedZone coverage. Rather, they are spur-of-the-moment look-ins.
Why turn away from RedZone when you can see D.J Moore catch a bomb from Kyle Allen to keep the Panthers in it. I know I won’t be changing the channel anytime soon.
Vatz thinks a RedZone type set-up with baseball would be interesting, but it could only work at certain instances.
“If you have situations where you’re bottom eight, down one, first and second one out, that’d be cool,” Vatz said. “That’s a big one. A lot of stress, it’d be interesting. And especially with a game like that, where baseball can last forever. In a game, you get the best aspects of the game, but you’d only be able to do it at certain times because they only occur like late in games.”
On the other hand, some believe it couldn’t work with any other sport because of the intermittent scoring.
“In any other sport the scoring is spontaneous,” Gattens said. “It is back and forth. You don’t have a point where you’re setting up to score [in other sports]. In football you know they’re marching down to the Red Zone and you have a precursor that you know they’re going to score. The other sports would be highlight shows.”
Zac Eldridge, a freshman at Towson University, isn’t sure if it could work for other sports because it would be replays of scores rather than live gameplay.
“The reason it works well for football is because of all the football games are on at the same time,” Eldridge said. “It flips to a game that is in the redzone, meaning they are close to scoring. Most other sports can score at any time so I’m not sure how you would predict that.”
Sports communication expert Tyler Sigmon points out that the Olympics has similar coverage as RedZone.
“Where we do see some similarity in particularly is during the Olympics coverage where you get some of the whip around coverage in the primetime events when the Olympics are occurring in a time zone where it is prudent to do so,” said Sigmon.
Well if your in this time zone, Todd Gurley leaps over the pile for the Rams to find the endzone. People on the east and west coast are going wild over that play.
The upcoming Olympics will be in Tokyo, and for viewers in the United States, they will rely on taped games to watch during primetime TV. In order to show each and every game, broadcasters will take the audience to several different games within one hour in order to show all of the pivotal moments.
Additionally, the NFL has the least amount of games played in a season, so every one is crucial. For sports like baseball where there are 162 games in a season compared to the NFL’s 16, the amount of content would be too much.
“The NFL plays a 16-week schedule, which means for fans, those 16 games are appointment viewing,” Sigmon said.
The scarcity of games is what makes NFL RedZone so appealing. For other sports, the games seem to matter less due to the high number played in one season.
The increase of people playing fantasy football and participating in gambling has caused them to watch RedZone. As more people are becoming involved with the game and individual players, there is a market for RedZone to exist.
Vatz believes that as long as fantasy football continues to expand, RedZone will continue to grow.
“More people are playing fantasy football, more people are gamling, more people kind of have say in these games,” Vatz said. “So that [RedZone] is a very good way as we mentioned to keep an eye on those games and it’s a good way to keep track of everything. And I think that as long as that keeps expanding which it says it’s going to I think you’re going to have a need for a market like that.”
Diehard fans will most likely continue to watch a full game of their favorite team.
But before we near the end of our show, Robert Mostert puts an exclamation point on the game as he breaks the plane to give the 49ers a 37-8 lead. It’s been such an eventful day here on NFL Network.
As Sigmon said, “I think you will always have those hard core fans that are going to watch their team, pull for their team, through the thick and the thin. That is never going to go away completely.”
Veslany comments on her experience watching Redzone:
“Now like every week here is the recap of every touchdown from every game today. Have a great night and see you next week,” says Scott Hanson as the clock strikes 8 p.m. The touchdown feed begins to fly across the screen as the outro music commences.
Now all of your productivity planned for Sunday just went out the window because you watched RedZone for seven straight hours with no commercials.