Fox Sports Detroit Puts All Hands on Deck for ‘Football Week in Michigan’

Among the highlights is implementing SkyCam on eight high school football championship games

This year, in the great state of Michigan, Thanksgiving Week is going to have a big-game feel. Fox Sports Detroit is putting on a special effort to present a special week in the area with the introduction of “Football Week in Michigan.”

As part of Fox Sports Detroit’s initiative Football Week in Michigan, broadcasters John Keating and Matt Shepard are joining former Lions legend Herman Moore on a bus tour around the state to promote the event.

In the ultimate synergy of Fox Sports branding, a load of high-profile football games that will air on Fox networks will take place in the Detroit Metro Area during an epic eight-day.

The football feast begins this Saturday, with Michigan State vs. Maryland and continues with the Detroit Lions in their annual Thanksgiving game and Michigan vs. Ohio State — all on Fox broadcast — and MHSAA high school semifinal and championship games on Fox Sports Detroit. The RSN will deploy SkyCam on championship games played at Ford Field.

According the Greg Hammaren, SVP/GM, Fox Sports Detroit, the festivities are the result of a unique confluence of events in the area, and his network is in the opportune position to capitalize on it. “It’s just an amazing collection of really big brands who are playing really big games for fans who absolutely love football.”

Hammaren notes that, when the schedule was mapped out and the idea of Football Week in Michigan became a reality, it took a comprehensive effort by the Fox Sports Detroit team to partner with all the Fox Sports O&Os and affiliates in the state to get them all to buy in. The efforts were successful. Even the universities (Michigan and Michigan State) and the Lions were fully supportive of the initiative.

“Every time I talked to somebody about the program, they got more and more excited about it. They offered up more and more ideas, and it has since become not just a shared promo among all of us but a week-long state-wide event,” says Hammaren, noting that even Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has officially designated the upcoming week Football Week in Michigan.

To help spread the word about the event, Executive Producer Jeff Byle and his team has been producing feature pieces and additional content to tell the stories of football across the state. In addition, a state-wide bus tour has been venturing across Michigan with former Lions receiver Herman Moore and Fox Sports mascot Cletus stopping at events to promote the initiative.

The network not only is loaded with live football content to produce but will still have two Red Wings games and a Pistons game on Thanksgiving to produce on top of it. Needless to say, it’s all hands on deck.

“It’s pretty easy when you are managing people who are excited about the process,” says Byle. “Whenever we can do events and a product like Football Week in Michigan that people are excited about, it’s easy to get the creative juices to start flowing.”

The coolest production element in this whole effort, though, is the resources that Fox Sports Detroit is allocating to cover eight high school football championships on the Friday and Saturday of Thanksgiving Weekend. The network will roll up Mobile TV Group’s 12HDX and deploy eight manned cameras, five unmanned cameras (for booth, POV, and beauty shots), and — incredibly for high school games — SkyCam.

SkyCam will already be at Ford Field for the Lions-Vikings game on Thursday, and Fox Sports Detroit has worked it so that that SkyCam can just stay in place for eight games’ worth of high school championships.

“Can you imagine how good this game looks for high school kids playing in these games: playing in an NFL stadium with NFL videoboards and an NFL-quality production,” says Hammaren. “We put every ounce of money and energy into producing these games, and they get to play on a big stage for a big audience. It’s a thrill for these kids. Now that we’re adding SkyCam, it just brings that over the top.”

It all puts a dramatic exclamation point on one of the most exciting weeks in the history of Fox Sports Detroit, a week that Hammaren acknowledges has taught him a lot about how important his network can be to the Michigan community.

“What I’m humbled by is the willingness of everybody that we’ve worked with to be our partner, even the folks [at Fox headquarters] in Los Angeles,” he says. “I mean, here we are in Detroit, the production team and the marketing team for Fox Sports are 1,000 miles away, and they jumped on board. I’ve been very humbled by the response, support, and enthusiasm for all of this, and I learned that we can rally amazing resources among ourselves when you have the right idea and you’re doing it for the right reasons.”