By Richard Deitsch, The Athletic
BUFFALO, N.Y. — When you ask Ethan Cooperson about the most memorable statistic he has created during his 24 years as a statistician for CBS’ top NFL telecast, he journeys back to Dec. 31, 2017, for a regular-season finale in frigid Foxborough, Mass., between the eventual Super Bowl runner-up New England Patriots and the forever struggling New York Jets. The final was 26-6, which clinched home-field advantage throughout the entire AFC playoffs for the Patriots, but Cooperson remembers the game for his small part in the telecast.
“So it’s Tom Brady playing against the Jets, and I was thinking a lot about that during my research that week,” Cooperson said. “I wondered how far down the Jets all-time leaders in touchdown passes I’d have to go to match up with Brady’s career total? Well, it turned out that if you added up the touchdown passes of the (top four) all-time passing touchdown leaders for the Jets at that time, the total between the four of them was 486 touchdown passes. That was the exact number Brady had at that point. So we aired a graphic (below).”
“Some of the CBS folks who were Jets fans took that one especially hard,” Cooperson continued, laughing. “But the juxtaposition of Brady against the Jets jumped out. People took notice of it. That was a really fun one to do.”
Thomas Boorstein is the Butch to Cooperson’s statistical Sundance on CBS’ top NFL crew. Asked about his all-time favorite statistic that made air, he brings up a Steelers–Chargers game on Nov. 16, 2008, that ended in a Pittsburgh 11-10 win. With the score at 10-8 in the fourth quarter, play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz wondered off-air if there had ever been a game with an 11-10 score. Boorstein told Todd Keryc, the broadcast associate in charge of graphics at the time, that the crew could be looking at the first 11-10 game in NFL history. This was a world before the Scorigami craze.
“Todd worked with the operator to get the graphic prepped and Ethan ran a search on the data we had access to at the time and figured out it would be the first,” said Boorstein, who has worked with the network’s No. 1 broadcast group since 2008. “Then we quickly figured out how many games had been played all-time to add more context to it. We aired it prior to the kickoff following the field goal that made it 11-10.
“We always get a thrill when unconventional stats like that air, and the timing worked out perfectly. It was a nice three-second adrenaline rush before we went back to the game.”
While most reading this piece are familiar with the NFL broadcast law firm of Nantz, Buck and Tirico, there is a myriad of production people for the NFL-airing networks, such as Boorstein and Cooperson, who play an invaluable role on CBS’ most important television property. That great stat you saw on an NFL, NBA or MLB broadcast? It’s the product of a ton of work by associate producers, broadcast associates, graphic operators and statisticians.
The Athletic spent time with Boorstein and Cooperson in Buffalo last weekend for CBS’ divisional playoff broadcast of the Buffalo Bills against the Kansas City Chiefs. What becomes clear is game day is just a small part of the job. Boorstein and Cooperson’s preparation begins each week in the hours immediately after the game they just worked.
The two spend Monday coming up with potential ideas for the next broadcast, and then there is a Tuesday meeting led by lead producer Jim Rikhoff where initial graphic elements for the broadcast are discussed. Later that day, Boorstein and Cooperson meet with broadcast associate Brooke Weiss for a 90-minute ideas call. That trio is the heartbeat of the statistical graphics you see every Sunday on the Nantz-Tony Romo-Tracy Wolfson broadcast. Weiss will ultimately create and produce the graphics from a week-long collaboration between the three.
“Rikhoff is always pushing us to find new angles on stuff,” Cooperson said. “So, Brooke, Thomas and I are always thinking about: How can we show something that’s different?”
After Nantz, Romo and Wolfson hold production meetings with the coaches and players from the teams later in the week, Boorstein and Cooperson will hear from the broadcasters to look into a stat that the team provided. Sometimes the team is right. Sometimes not. The statisticians, though, have to be as close to perfect as possible.
“It’s live TV, so it’s not perfect,” Cooperson said. “It’s never going to be perfect. What is a concern, and I don’t recall this happening for us, is if you show that someone has broken a record and they actually haven’t because something was inaccurate. That would be a problem. If you want to be perfect, you’re probably not in the right kind of work. That said, you want to make sure you’re very close to perfect and, on the important stuff, you are always correct.”
On the Saturday prior to the Chiefs-Bills game, key production staff met in a downtown Buffalo hotel conference room for a detailed rundown for the next day. Weiss built about 250 lower-third graphics (those that appear on the bottom of your screen) and about 30 full-page or specialty graphics. At the meeting, as he does every week, Rikhoff asked Nantz and Romo how they felt about the graphics presented at the meeting because they are the ones who will talk about it on-air.
One graphic that had everyone excited showed the most playoff wins by a quarterback-coach duo, which included Tom Brady and Bill Belichick (30), Terry Bradshaw and Chuck Noll (14) and Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes (now 13). It never made air on Sunday.
As Weiss will tell you, maybe 15 percent of all the graphics created in a given week will make the broadcast. She said the best stuff often gets made on the fly during games.
“Say the starting quarterback gets injured on the first snap of the game. OK, we’ve lost half of our stuff,” said Weiss, who is in her sixth year at CBS Sports and third on the top crew. “What are we going to do now? How often do we make stuff on the fly? Well, it feels like every single second of the game. Every single drive we’re thinking about how to tell a better story. During a commercial break, I’ll always say, ‘Thomas, what is the story here? What am I missing.’ He and Ethan have fully changed the way I think about stats and the things I look for in a game. They are meticulous and anal in the best way possible.”
Boorstein and Cooperson had been thinking all week about interesting ways to highlight Travis Kelce, not because of the Taylor Swift connection, but because of how close he was to some notable receiving marks. How does this manifest itself? In the second quarter of the game, viewers saw a specialty graphic that listed the most postseason touchdowns by a quarterback-receiver duo that the three had previously prepared.
Cooperson works full-time for Sportradar, the sports technology company that serves as the data provider for multiple sports networks (including CBS Sports) as well as leagues such as the NBA. He is on the road often, working for several outlets, including serving as the game statistician for Westwood One’s “Monday Night Football” broadcast with Kevin Harlan. He arrived in Buffalo on Sunday morning after working a Marquette-St. John’s basketball game in New York City for Fox Sports the night before. Boorstein also has a separate job away from CBS Sports. They are paid by CBS as part-time employees.
Inside the broadcast booth at Highmark Stadium on Sunday, Cooperson was stationed to the right of rules analyst Gene Steratore and to the left of Tommy Spencer, who is on the road with Nantz for much of the year as his longtime NFL and golf spotter. (Then it’s Nantz and Romo to Spencer’s right.) Cooperson brought with him a stack of blue and white index cards, some with notes and some blank, and during the game, he wrote furiously on the cards and passed along statistical notes to Nantz.
It’s like that every play. He stays in constant touch with Boorstein, who was stationed inside a production truck in a parking lot outside of the stadium. Boorstein and Weiss sit next to each other in the production truck during games, and part of Boorstein’s role on Sundays is inputting all the plays into the QBStat machine, which is the name of the software provided by SMT that feeds the monitor the broadcasters have in the booth at the stadium as well as the font machine that shows lower-third and full-page graphics and the score machine that shows team and player stats throughout the game.
Boorstein and Cooperson communicate via headset in some form on every play, producing a constant flow of information. Boorstein said his favorite on-the-fly stat from Sunday was a graphic that showed three lead changes in 6 minutes, 45 seconds after the second Kelce touchdown. For the ones they built ahead of time, he loved the stat showing how good Josh Allen is on third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 quarterback sneaks. (He was 18 of 20 during the regular season.)
“For the stats we can search on our own, we can get something in seconds and then get a graphic built quickly,” Boorstein said. “Our operators, Brandon Kurtz and Alan Layton, can type at court-reporter speed so we can get from idea to a graphic on air in 30 seconds or less.”
Cooperson has been with CBS’ top crew longer than all of the current announcers. He was working freelance for NBC’s NBA coverage in the late 1990s when he learned that Greg Gumbel (who was then working with Phil Simms on CBS’ top team) was looking for a stats person. An NBC Sports contact vouched for Cooperson, and Gumbel and then-producer Mark Wolff took a chance on him. He said when he first started doing stats for Fox Sports in 1995, his research tools were arcane — things like a league record book or media guides.
“To be honest with you, the standards were so much lower,” Cooperson said. “I think about some graphics that we got on the air my first year with CBS in 2000 and we thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ Well, nowadays, a 10-year-old with an internet connection could find that stat in 20 seconds.”
Both Boorstein and Cooperson say they take great pride in being part of such a major American communal experience.
“The stats we come up with are going to be seen by millions and millions of people, and we have a say in that,” Cooperson said. “That’s really cool.”
The statisticians exited Highmark Stadium late Sunday night following another heartbreaking postseason loss for Buffalo that will probably produce a Swift song one day. Boorstein flew back to New York early Monday. Cooperson was headed for Chicago via a flight in Rochester. Then it was on to Baltimore later in the week for the AFC Championship Game, where new stats await for millions.
Behind the scenes with CBS at Highmark Stadium. Ethan Cooperson is in the green sweater, with Gene Steratore at far left. Jim Nantz and Tony Romo are at right. (Richard Deitsch / The Athletic)
(Top photo of CBS statisticians Thomas Boorstein, Brooke Weiss and Ethan Cooperson: Richard Deitsch / The Athletic)