College Football Kickoff 2025: ESPN Gears Up for 1,000+ Games With Massive Operational Footprint

28/08/2025

College Football Kickoff 2025: ESPN Gears Up for 1,000+ Games With Massive Operational Footprint New season brings HDR expansion, SkyCam AR, Dante audio kits, other upgrades By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 2:22 pm

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For fans, the start of college football means tailgates, rivalries, and wall-to-wall television on Saturdays. For ESPN's remote-operations team, it means something else entirely: scale.

This fall, ESPN will once again deliver more than 1,000 college football games across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, ACC Network, ESPN+, and more. That staggering number of live productions demands a variety of production models: five full-truck primetime productions, nine REMI crews, and hundreds of games produced by packagers or school-based crews.

An ESPN camera operator shoots on the field at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, AL, during a college-football regular-season game last year. (Photo: Phil Ellsworth/ESPN Images)

The spotlight remains brightest on Saturday late afternoons and evenings on ABC, where the SEC on ABC brand is entering its second season. In its first year, SEC on ABC captured the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Live Series, marking the first time in 45 years that a college-football property has earned that award.

For the big shows, we kind of rotate three of our larger crews into those big Saturday-night and 3:30 games, says Jim Birch, senior remote operations manager, ESPN. They're stacked with all the fun stuff: SkyCam, shallow depth of field, RF handhelds. Line-to-gain pylons are on all these shows. The approach is pretty similar to last year. There are small variances - SkyCam AR graphics coming to one of the shows - but [the productions are] fairly similar to last year. It's hard to get them bigger than we already have.

This year, ESPN has also bulked up its second- and third-largest crews. The broadcaster's L crew, for example, is using Sony HDC-4800's and EVS servers to bring 8X super-slow-motion replay into the workflow. AR graphics are being introduced on SkyCam for certain games, and telestration tools have been upgraded with enhanced player- and field-tracking capabilities.

SEC Network's prime-window package (V crew) has been elevated from a REMI to a full-truck production. Meanwhile, two of ESPN's larger REMI crews - the D and J crews - now deploy SkyCam, adding another layer of coverage depth.

From a rights perspective, 2025 marks ESPN's second season as the exclusive home of the SEC and its first year under an expanded Big 12 deal. Combined with its long-term all-in agreement with the ACC, the portfolio cements ESPN as the undisputed leader in college-football programming.

This is truly the primetime property that ESPN has year over year outside of the NFL, says Catherine Chalfant, remote operations manager, ESPN, who joined the football team this year after extensive experience on ESPN's college basketball coverage. Even our smaller shows are really large. We've prided ourselves this year on making sure that our crews are supported with the adequate personnel and gear they need so that each week to week is pretty much a seamless execution.

Refining REMI At the mid-tier level, ESPN continues to evolve its REMI workflows, with a focus this year on latency and digital infrastructure.

One of the initiatives we took this season, Birch says, is to look at the latency of our net returns to get announcers in a better position to call the game with quicker returns. We've done a good job putting the proper encoding and technical people onsite to push that, and, from our Week 0 games, it looks like that was successful. We've been able to minimize that latency quite significantly from last season.

The REMI model also benefits from upgraded Dante audio kits - nicknamed Boom Slings - that are helping A1s manage booth audio more efficiently. With our REMI shows, he adds, we upgraded our booth kits for Dante infrastructure to give a little bit of control for the A1s. It goes back to embracing our digital workflows and moving away from the analog ones where we can.

Support for School Productions At the base tier, dozens of ESPN+ games are produced directly by schools through conference production agreements. Those productions vary in scale, and ESPN has invested in support structures and partnerships to help them all succeed.

We have a dedicated team that works with the school productions, Birch explains. We're there as guidance with the partnership. We appreciate their knowledge of their venues, their execution. In the beginning, there was more communication to get them up and running. Now they're doing such a great job, and we're there to support.

Chalfont adds that the schools often provide vital feedback to ESPN's ops team: They've almost supported us more than we've supported them. They send us information about venue changes, construction, new board placements - things that can impact future games. That knowledge is invaluable.

The school-production ecosystem has also become a training ground for future ESPN operations staff. Some school-based producers are shadowing ESPN truck productions this season, with hopes of transitioning into larger roles.

Chaos Management Even with careful planning, the opening weeks of the season remain a logistical gauntlet. With dozens of nonconference matchups on the slate, ESPN may stage as many as 16 SEC games in a single weekend.

I would define it as controlled chaos, Birch says. We've been preparing for the last few months. With the support we've got from the department in bulking up our management team, it has prepared us for this. We're positioned now to control the little bit of chaos that we have for the first few

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College Football Kickoff 2025: ESPN Gears Up for 1,000+ Games With Massive Operational Footprint

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