CFP National Championship 2026: For a Slew of Studio Shows, ESPN Turns Hard Rock Stadium Into a Production Campus

CFP National Championship 2026: For a Slew of Studio Shows, ESPN Turns Hard Rock Stadium Into a Production Campus24+ hours of live studio programming are planned across ESPN nets, ACC Network, ABC, digitalBy Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Monday, January 19, 2026 - 12:21 pm

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For ESPN, the College Football Playoff National Championship is more than just a game. By the time Miami Gardens hosts college football's final kickoff of the season, Hard Rock Stadium will have been operating for days as a temporary broadcast center: a multi-network, multi-platform production campus supporting wall-to-wall studio, digital, and shoulder programming from Friday through Tuesday.

Studio shows have been airing live from the site of the CFP National Championship Game all weekend. Here, the set of Championship Drive is located in the stadium parking lot on Saturday. (Photos: Phil Ellsworth/ESPN Images)

It's not just about Monday night anymore, says Judi Weiss, manager, remote operations, ESPN. We're coming in bright and early and staying well past the game. It's a long haul, and it takes a real campus approach to pull it off.

In total, ESPN is producing more than 24 hours of live studio programming from South Florida across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ACC Network, ESPN Digital platforms, and ABC, with Hard Rock Stadium serving as the operational hub.

From Game Site to Broadcast CampusInstead of scattering sets across the city, ESPN centralized nearly all championship studio activity on stadium property - a strategic choice that simplifies logistics while dramatically increasing the density of production in one location.

We're centralized at the stadium, says David Baker, tech specialist, studio, ESPN. We're utilizing one outdoor set with the stadium as a backdrop, a set inside the concourse, and a field set. We roll crews on and off each of those positions depending on the show.

The approach turns Hard Rock Stadium into a studio village, where multiple shows can originate simultaneously or hand off among locations without leaving the compound footprint. Limited teams will be dispatched offsite to gather supplemental content, but the physical production infrastructure remains concentrated.

Having everything in one spot really helps, Weiss says. In other years, we've gone all over cities. Here, the focus is building one campus that can support everything.

ESPN has erected a row of studio-set spaces in the upper concourse of Hard Rock Stadium, beneath one of the building's corner videoboards.

Designing for Choreography, Not Just ShowsThe campus mindset extends well beyond set construction. The studio operation is designed around constant motion: overlapping shows, rotating crews, shifting technical resources, and a schedule that runs from early-morning programming straight through post-championship coverage.

We come in early Monday morning, and we're here until well after the game, Weiss says. First crew call is around 5:30 a.m., and the last people will probably be walking away close to two in the morning.

Throughout the day, ESPN will cycle through a wide range of live programming, from morning and afternoon studio shows to pregame coverage, halftime hits, and multiple postgame productions. Field sets, concourse positions, and outdoor desk locations are all active parts of the plan, with camera crews and technical teams moving fluidly among them.

From a studio standpoint, this becomes choreography, Baker notes. You're not just building one set for one show. You're designing an environment where shows can hand off, overlap, and share resources without friction.

Multi-Network Integration OnsiteThe championship studio operation is also one of the rare moments each year when ESPN's broader ecosystem fully converges at a single event. Alongside ESPN's primary studio coverage, the campus is hosting ACC Network productions, ESPN Digital shows, and crossover programming, all emanating from the same physical footprint.

One thing that's unique about this year, Weiss says, is having the conference network back onsite with us. That adds another layer to what we're building and coordinating.

For the operations teams, that convergence demands a different level of communication and planning than a typical road show. Resources, space, transmission paths, and staffing are all mapped months in advance to account for the number of overlapping productions.

We rely heavily on communication between our event partners and our studio teams, Weiss says. They're at these venues all season. They know the buildings, the quirks, what's changed. That information is huge for us when we come in to build a studio operation.

Built on an IP-Connected FoundationLike the game production, the studio environment at Hard Rock Stadium is supported by a native-HDR, IP-connected compound, allowing studio shows to share feeds, camera resources, and infrastructure with the game and MegaCast operations.

We're integrating as a full-HDR compound, and a lot of it is connected via IP, Baker says. We've been linking our studio and game environments throughout the season, so, by the time we get here, those workflows are well-established. Then it just scales up.

Season-long integration allows ESPN to treat Championship Week less like a technical outlier and more like the largest expression of workflows in daily use. The difference is scale - and density.

At this point, Baker says, it's not about introducing something brand new. It's about expanding what we already do every week into a much larger, more interconnected operation.

ACC Network's ACC Huddle is one of the many ESPN and Disney shows broadcasting live from the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/01/19/cfp-national-championship-2026-...
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