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
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
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
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
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 
