College Football 2022 Preview: Pac-12 Networks Tackles Busy Fall With Hybrid Onsite/At-Home Production

This academic year will be P12N’s last in its current San Francisco facility

In college sports, change is inevitable. For Pac-12 Networks, the 2022-23 academic year presents its fair share of evolving opportunities. And its production and operations team is tackling them the way it always does: with an innovative eye.

On one hand, this fall brings a welcome return to pre-pandemic conditions onsite, with trucks and crews having greater access and availability to the conference’s marquee venues. On the other hand, this season marks the network’s last at its downtown San Francisco headquarters: the network announced plans to move its operations next summer.

Pac-12 Networks is slated to produce live coverage of 235 events this fall, with more than 130 done via its new Software Defined Production model. (Photo: Pac-12 Networks)

With all the change ahead, football returns in full force this weekend, when Pac-12 Networks will produce and deliver six games (one on Thursday night and five on Saturday). In fact, a busy out-of-conference schedule means that 15 of the 37 football games that the network will produce this season are in the first three weeks of the season.

“This year feels like a real return to normal, in contrast to the many disruptions caused by the pandemic,” says Ryan Currier, SVP, engineering and products, Pac-12 Networks. “We are optimistic about a strong season and the opportunity to refocus the light on some great storylines and performances by our student-athletes.”

Pac-12 Networks’ plan for this football season features an even balance of production models. Sixteen games will be full onsite truck productions; the remaining 21 will feature various degrees of the network’s multi-cam/at-home hybrid workflow.

Even on full truck shows, the network integrates its scorebug and handles some replay operations from its San Francisco headquarters, while the rest of the show is done onsite. For all games, the network’s 1st-and-Ten line, provided by SMT, is operated from HQ. For most games, the network is able to enhance productions with deeper replay breakdowns via Chyron Paint. Though used selectively, the remote model allows a smaller core of artists to focus on telling deeper, more visual stories through replay that can be distributed across the conference’s footprint of games on a given Saturday.

Full bidirectional connectivity to all 12 of the member institutions’ football venues allows these tools to be plugged directly into the internal network of the truck parked onsite.

“As a network,” says Currier, “we have always balanced goals around producing high-quality coverage of our amazing teams and schools with delivering as much revenue as possible back to our members for them to invest in creating a successful environment for student-athletes. That continues to be a driving force behind initiatives like at-home production and motivates us to continually seek opportunities to innovate in order to deliver on that commitment.

The typical P12N football broadcast deploys six or seven traditionally operated camera positions, along with multiple static or robotic POVs, an All-22, and beauty shots of venues for bumpers in and out of breaks. According to Kyle Reischling, VP, remote events, Pac-12 Networks, multiple high-frame-rate cameras will be added to the lineup for larger productions of in-conference games later in the season.

For truck shows, the network continues to work with NEP Broadcasting, and NEP M-12 will serve as the season’s primary mobile unit. For the hybrid shows, Gravity Media Opus and Ovation units anchor the efforts at the stadium.

Executing this diverse mix of production flavors is the job of the team in San Francisco, including Senior Director, Production Operations, Sarah Backerman; Manager, Live Events Engineering, Nick Brandt; Senior Production Manager Lilli Junker; Remote Technology Manager Brent Brown; and Production Specialist, Studio Operations/SDP Joey Balli.

Beyond football, Pac-12 Networks will deliver 235 live productions this fall (and that’s not including postseason events that may emerge). Network staffers spent the summer continuing to refine the innovative Software Defined Production (SDP) workflow. This setup is expected to be used on more than 130 events this year, an uptick from a year ago.

The college football season begins at Pac-12 Networks on Thursday night when Arizona State hosts Northern Arizona (10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT). P12N returns with five more games on Saturday, starting with Bowling Green at UCLA (2:30 p.m. ET/11:30 a.m. PT). Pac-12 Networks’ traveling pregame show The Pregame returns on Saturday, Sept. 10 at Utah.