Live From Super Bowl LIX: FOX Sports' Brad Zager on the Bourbon Street Effort and Covering All the Angles We owe it to New Orleans to show that the attack isn't going to stop the spirit of Bourbon Street By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, February 7, 2025 - 11:38 am
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Since 2021, FOX Sports President, Production and Operations, Brad Zager has laid out the vision for the ambitious Fox Sports efforts for events big and small. He sat down with SVG at the FOX Sports Super Bowl media event yesterday to discuss how the planning for a pregame studio set on Bourbon Street came together, the impact of the terrorist attack five weeks ago, and, of course, making sure game coverage is all it can be.
FOX Sports' Brad Zager: New Orleans built the set for us. Our sets [for other events] are large and over the top, but here we just need to put ourselves in the middle of Bourbon Street.
Walk us through your vision for FOX Sports and Super Bowl LIX, particularly the vision of a pregame studio set on Bourbon Street.
This is a great Super Bowl town, so it's easy when you start planning to kind of copy-and-paste because there have been so many Super Bowls here. We came down here last February on our way to Daytona and walked around. To be honest with you, it felt at that point that everything has been done here, except trying to shut down Bourbon Street. I know that sounds crazy, but you don't get a chance to do the Super Bowl very often. We've been very lucky to do three of the last six or three of the last five calendar years, and we don't get another one for four years. If you're ever going to take big swings and put 100% into figuring out why you shouldn't do something, it's for the Super Bowl.
We left there saying, Hey, let's try to make this happen. It's a big swing, but there are enough fallback locations in New Orleans to go to if we need to. But the idea of people turning on their television on Sunday morning and seeing our guys with Bourbon Street behind them felt exactly how the Super Bowl in New Orleans should be. We're so blessed with the greatest operations team with [FOX Sports, EVP, Technical And Field Operations] Mike Davies and [VP, Remote Studio Operations] Rod Conti. They spent much time down here trying to make this happen. It's a testament to the operational team who figured this out.
Our philosophy has always been to follow the flow of the day. When you're in New Orleans, where do you want the viewer to start their day? It's the French Quarter and Bourbon Street. It may sound simple, but it was very difficult to pull off, and again, Mike and Rod deserve all the credit for making this happen. And now [FOX Super Bowl Sunday Pregame Producer] Bill Richards has this canvas to paint some unbelievable pictures for the viewer when they turn on the Super Bowl.
It also seems like a great example of something that would not have been done without fiber and IP technologies, because you can't put a production truck on Bourbon Street for a week.
Yes. The first thing we had to do was take a step back and say that New Orleans built the set for us. Our sets in Miami or Qatar are large and over the top, but here we just need to put ourselves in the middle of Bourbon Street.
The technical team has to figure out all the connectivity, how to make that happen, the lighting and all that stuff on Bourbon Street, like the scenic to make sure it's popping. I give them all the credit in the world, and it has been a fun evolution to watch from where we started to seeing it now.
The other thing is, most Super Bowl sets are set up and used the whole week, but we don't have that luxury. We can rehearse on Saturday and then tear it down and rebuild it Sunday morning when Bourbon Street closes. We can't sit here today and talk about being ready to go for Sunday because we literally won't know that until late Sunday morning. That is a different feeling going into a Super Bowl weekend.
Five weeks ago, we all saw the tragedy on Bourbon Street. What was that morning like for you, knowing its impact on your plans?
I knew what we were doing in New Orleans for the Super Bowl wasn't going to be what we had planned over the past year. We knew that you want to let the city get through the initial grief, but your head's immediately going to Alright, things have changed, New Orleans has changed.
We started to think immediately what that means. That following Monday, [FOX Sports CEO] Eric Shanks, Bill Richards, and I came down here, met with the governor, met with the state police, and walked the whole scene of where the terrorist attack took place. It was unreal to walk it with the state police officers, whose co-workers and people that they look at as family dealt with [the tragedy] five days earlier. It was still really, really raw; they're still processing everything. There were definitely people that, in that moment, felt like the right thing to do was to stay away from Bourbon Street. And then there were people who felt, Let's just let this breathe a little bit.
To be honest, I felt stronger about the fact that we have to show the country that Bourbon Street's okay, that we owe it to Bourbon Street and we owe it to New Orleans to show that that event isn't going to stop the spirit of Bourbon Street. That's what we're going to try to bring across on Sunday in the pregame, and I think you'll also see something at the start the game that'll show you the spirit of Bourbon Street. It's going to be special.
With respect to the game itself, Mike Davies mentioned how tech for this game is a season-long process rather than a new toy or technology that the team hasn't had a chance to put to use. Can you discuss that philo
