It's like going to football heaven: a visit to NFL films

Sporting News, The, Dec 1, 2003 by Matt Crossman

Ron Jaworski is on the phone, but he doesn't sound like Ron Jaworski. He is trying to sound like Bill Cowher. Pittsburgh was crushed by San Francisco the night before, and Jaworski is leaving Merril Hoge a crank message. Sounds like something straight out of EA Sports NFL Matchup, the program on which the two are analysts. Hoge played for Pittsburgh, and Jaworski likes to jab him about being a Steelers apologist.

There is laughter in the room as Jaws leaves the message--and debate about the merits of his ability to affect a Pittsburgh accent.

Welcome to NFL Films, where if you can't laugh at crank voicemails left for Merril Hoge, I've got tickets for a Tigers-Indians game in July for you.

I'm here at NFL Films headquarters to see what it's like in the football capital of the world. Any time would be a good time to be here, but the middle of the playoff hunt, I figure, has to be especially cool.

I spend a good chunk of the day with the staff of NFL Matchap, which is produced by NFL Films and airs on ESPN. As Jaworski, executive producer Greg Cosell and a handful of staff members review game after game to prepare that week's show, I eavesdrop on conversations taking place in the hall. The first one I hear is something about blitz packages. Cosell tells me most of the behind-the-scenes staff played college ball. One still holds the New Jersey high school state passing record.

Most of the people I see are men in their 20s in jeans and sweatshirts. Miniature footballs apparently are mandatory office props.

Patrick Pantano of the public relations department gives me a tour of the 200,000-square-foot facility. It sits in an otherwise nondescript office park in southern New Jersey and looks like something out of a Michael Crichton techno-thriller. Only, they splice film instead of dinosaur genes.

I think M.C. Escher designed the interior. At one point, I enter a studio on one side, then exit on the opposite side but somehow wind up where I started. The walls are lined with action photos of plays big and small--from The Catch (Dwight Clark) to Joey Harrington getting crushed. Posters from football movies cover the cafeteria walls. Posters from nonsports movies are interspersed elsewhere.

What I learn is there's a lot more to NFL Films than frozen tundra and the voice of God. It's a football history museum on celluloid. NFL Films has every game since 1965 on film, highlights of every game since 1949 and footage dating to the 1894 Princeton-Rutgers game, which was filmed by Thomas Edison. A half-dozen TV shows are filmed here. Everything is state-of-the-art, right down to the temperature-controlled film room. All that cool music you hear as you watch the video montages is written, performed and recorded here. The company even has branched into nonsports documentaries.

Still, the business here is football, and when news breaks midafternoon that Keyshawn Johnson has been deactivated for the season, the NFL Matchup office feels like the newsroom of a daily paper. The word buzzes through the halls. The person who breaks the story to us says she's going to call Derrick Brooks to ask what's going on. Bunch of football junkies, these people.

E-mail associate editor Matt Crossman at mcrossman@news.com.