UFL Kickoff 2025: Fox Sports Continues to Prioritize Innovation With All-Access Audio, MindFly Bodycams, and Aerial Cameras

Fox views spring football league as an 'important part of the future of football in America.'

The UFL’s sophomore season returns to the FOX Sports broadcast airwaves Friday, complete with an emphasis on innovation, all-access audio, player-worn body cameras and other forms of technology being integrated into its live broadcasts.

Starting at 8 p.m. ET, the St. Louis Battlehawks face the Houston Roughnecks at John O’Quinn Field at TDECU Stadium in Houston. Play-by-play caller Curt Menefee and analyst Joel Klatt return as FOX’s lead broadcast team this year.

“The first season of the UFL was a real large continuation of what the XFL and the USFL was for us,” said Brad Cheney, vice president of field ops/engineering, FOX Sports. “It was really a proving point that says spring football matters and is going to be an important part of the future of football in America.”

Home Run Production: FOX Continues To Cultivate HRP Model

FOX Sports (which owned the USFL and now owns half the UFL) will deploy Game Creek Gridiron truck to anchor the onsite production for half its shows; Mobile TV Group’s 53Flex and 46Flex will handle the other half.

Game Creek Gridiron will be onsite for half of FOX Sports’ UFL shows.

Each FOX Sports game will be produced as a Home Run Production, with the production team operating out of a control room in the broadcaster’s Pico network center in Los Angeles. Each production truck is equipped with kits that allow the broadcast feeds to flow from the truck to Los Angeles with a minimal delay.

“[Remote production] gives us the benefit of using a lot of the same production personnel to produce the games, the graphics people, the replay operators,” says Cheney. “They are super-familiar with the sport at this point because they’re seeing all the teams regularly. They’re able to help production a lot more in that aspect. Bringing this home and doing it this way does benefit our production crews and raises the level of our production overall.”

Both FOX Sports and ESPN will leverage the UFL’s Technology Group, which is working with NEP Rentals (formerly Bexel) to support team and official communications and some of the player/coach/ref microphones. FOX Sports is supplementing its production with CP Communications, which is providing all the broadcaster’s player-mic support.

Here’s a breakdown of most of the cameras being deployed by FOX Sports this season: eight hard cameras, seven point-of-view cameras, four super-slo-mos, two handhelds, two line-to-gain Dream Chip cameras, two Marshall cameras for referee HatCams, one Megalodon, one robotic camera for press conferences, a SkyCam, a drone, and a helicopter.

During UFL’s 2025 season, Beverly Hills Aerials’ custom-built Bumblebee drone will take viewers to field level to see the speed of the game.

“The way our directors have been able to intersperse the SkyCam, the Megalodon on the field, and the drone itself and get them to tie together in a solid coverage plan is important to how well we’ve executed it and how good it looks on TV,” Cheney says, adding, “Our directors have spent a lot of time orchestrating these moves as if it’s a feature film.”

FAST Action: Ball Tracking, Mindfly Bodycams Are Part of New-Tech Initiative

One of the UFL’s key initiatives in its launch of FAST, a technology-centric division focused on innovation, is sensor-based ball-tracking via a partnership with Sportable. “Smart balls” offer the broadcaster access to the data. It will take multiple games for the data to be received and understood, Cheney explains, and for the production team to craft a plan to redevelop and present the information for a live broadcast. “We’re very excited about being able to have the full real-time data set,” he says, adding that hopes are to have the ball-tracking data ready for on-air by the midpoint of the season.

In addition, players — mostly on defense, according to Cheney — will wear a body camera during each game via the league’s relationship with Mindfly. The UFL will use up to four Mindfly player body-armor vests per week, with both FOX Sports and ESPN having a Mindfly game each week, according to Scott Harniman, SVP, technology, UFL. It’s an initiative that the UFL tested on referees toward the end of the 2024 season.

FOX Sports will select the players to wear the Mindfly vests during games. To capture their point-of-view, the new concept, which is part of the UFL’s FAST program, is about “showing the speed of the game,” Cheney says. “It gives us a different angle than the helmets were able to give us. We’ve got a lot more flexibility in putting them on players than we’ve had in the past.”

Wired for Audio: Increased Access Offers New Opportunities for Sound

When it comes to broadcast audio, the UFL is fantasy football. Almost everyone on and near the field — players, coaches, league officials — is wired for sound, although the number of mics will vary according to the broadcaster.

“We’re still heavy on access through audio,” says Lindsay Waine, senior operations manager, FOX Sports. “It’s a lot of access that a normal NFL or college football game doesn’t have.”

FOX Sports’ shows will have 24 bodypack microphones per game: 11 per team plus four parabolic mics and EFX microphones on all cameras. Offensive and defensive coordinators will be captured through their intercom partylines. A separate channel will listen in as officials’ debate on-field rulings, and yet another channel on the PLs can be switched to for interviews with coaches during the game.

In fact, this alternate-season football generates so much sound that the main challenge is managing it all.

“That’s the difference between a UFL and an NFL game [on television]: you have so many more microphones, and they’re all on almost all the time,” says FOX Sports UFL Lead A1 Michael DelTufo, who’s joined on the show by onsite submixers Joel Groblinghof, Eddie Verstraete, and Steve Goldfein. “That’s one experience I love about the UFL: that ability for us to be able to have that full immersive sound where you’re always on the field, always in the game. And I try to improve that every year. For me, it’s getting the balance of, say, where and when the coaches are heard. Do we take the coach live as soon as he comes on-camera? I try to keep us in that moment.”

Numerous conversations — between coach and quarterback, coordinators and coaches — are taking place simultaneously, even as commentators in the booth weigh in. Managing all the verbal traffic is still a work in progress, but the rewards for the avid viewer can be significant.

“Year 1, we learned that little by little as it got better,” he recalls. “We and NEP got better and better at it as the season went on. To me, one of the best things that we have is [rules analysts] Mike Pereira and Dean Blandino on the replay calls and having the referee on the field talk to the command center in L.A. and able to go through a play in real time.”

On UFL games, parabolic mics will be used closer to the action than on NFL games.

Helping that effort last year was greater use of parabolic microphones. Because the UFL allows deployment of parabs closer to the end zones, versus the NFL’s limiting them to between the 20- and 30-yard lines, more audio can be collected closer to the lines of scrimmage with less noise, making the mix easier to manage. Last year, Cheney noted that clearer field sound improves listening in on real-time conversations between players and coaches and among officials. That, he said, drives better viewer understanding of the league’s unique rules and faster fan engagement with it.

“With better parabolic placement,” says DelTufo, “we’re able to pull back a bit on the player mics and get a more consistent sound.”

He thinks that the UFL’s audio has reached a useful plateau, allowing opportunity for experimentation this season. That could include a semblance of object-based mixing, in which an audio channel can follow the POV of a Steadicam on the field. Although the UFL isn’t using Dolby Atmos, he says, immersive sound is a goal.

“We’re not at that point now,” DelTufo emphasizes. “It’s in the development stages, but that’s our next step that we’re working on to make you feel like you’re on the field.”

Along with testing of audio tech, helmet radios will be upgraded.

Last year, FOX Sports used the UFL productions to continue its testing and development of 5.1.4 sound, which DelTufo says will continue this season. Helmet radios will also have an upgrade this year.

“That’s where I think we’ve improved more than anything else: the radios between the players and the defensive or the offensive coordinators,” he says. “This year, we’re going to have more of that. And, 99% of the time, you’re hearing it in real time. That’s one of my favorite things about the UFL audio, and that technology every year improves a little.”

Last year’s inaugural season had teething issues typical of a new sport, and FOX Sports deployed the Sonofans augmented–crowd-sound system for the first few games, as it had done for its USFL broadcasts. The concept took hold for the empty venues during the COVID era but has proved useful in helping new sports ventures sound fuller on-air. ESPN did not use augmented audio for its UFL broadcasts. The system likely won’t be deployed this season, says DelTufo, although he doesn’t completely rule it out.

“We used a little bit and then went to the sound of the [actual] crowd last year” as crowd sizes increased, he says, citing games in St. Louis and Birmingham in particular. “However, we may have it on an as-needed basis. But there’s nothing like the sound of real fans, and we have them now.”

FOX Sports’ UFL production team includes, in addition to Cheney and Waine, Director, Engineering, Remote Operations Phil Abrahams; Executive Director, Remote Operations, Sarita Meinking; Director, Finance, Bryce Foster; Producer Mark Tietelman; Director Rich Dewey; Remote Engineering T.J. Scanlon; Senior Manager, Engineering, Rob Brotzman; Operations Managers Savannah Brotherton, Erin Gilleland, Kerston Corns, Jordan McFadden, and Jaime Necrason; and Tech Producers Carlos Gonzalez, Bill Moore, Eric Foster, Tom Lynch, Doug Fuchs, Sean Quashnie, and Sarah Derusha.