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Every play during an NFL game is filmed from multiple angles in high definition. There are cameras hovering over the field, cameras lashed to the goalposts and cameras pointed at the coaches, who have to cover their mouths to call plays.
But for all the footage available, and despite the $4 billion or so the NFL makes every year by selling its broadcast rights, there's some footage the league keeps hidden.
Every play during an NFL game is filmed from multiple angles in high definition. But there's some footage the league keeps hidden as Reed Albergotti explains on Lunch Break.
If you ask the league to see the footage that was taken from on high to show the entire field and what all 22 players did on every play, the response will be emphatic. "NO ONE gets that," NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy wrote in an email. This footage, added fellow league spokesman Greg Aiello, "is regarded at this point as proprietary NFL coaching information."
For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the "All 22."
While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage.
By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. "I don't think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game," says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a "fragment" of what happens on the field.
For much of the NFL's history, seeing only part of the field wasn't a big problem. Passing wasn't as common, or complex, as it is today.
The NFL's creative geniuses were focused on the ground game and the lively run-blocking schemes that came with it. But as NFL offenses began passing more and sending more players into passing routes, they began stretching out the area in which plays are executedגmaking the All-22 footage more valuable. By the 1980s, when San Francisco's Bill Walsh began to perfect his pass-intensive West Coast offense, a scheme that involved moving the ball with quick, methodical throws, more of the game began to disappear beyond the edge of the television screen. Today's offenses, which routinely use four or even the maximum five receivers, have all but outgrown the traditional zoomed-in view.
Without the expanded frame, fans often have no idea why many plays turn out the way they do, or if the TV analysts are giving them correct information. On a recent Sunday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Alex Smith threw a deep pass to tight end Delanie Walker for a 26-yard touchdown. Daryl Johnston, the Fox color man working the game, said Smith's throw was "placed perfectly" and that Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Corey Lynch was "a little bit late getting there."
Greg Cosell, producer of the ESPN program "NFL Matchup," who is one of the few people with access to All-22 footage, said the 49ers had purposely overloaded the right side of the field so each receiver would only be covered by one defender. Lynch, the safety, wasn't late getting there, Cosell says. He was doing his job and covering somebody else. Johnston could not be reached for comment.
Frank Hawkins, a former NFL executive during the 1990s who is now a Scalar Media Partners consultant, says he remembers the NFL considering releasing the All 22. The biggest objection, he said, came from the football people.
Charley Casserly, a former general manager who was a member of the NFL's competition committee, says he voted against releasing All-22 footage because he worried that if fans had access, it would open players and teams up to a level of criticism far beyond the current hum of talk radio. Casserly believed fans would jump to conclusions after watching one or two games in the All 22, without knowing the full story.
"I was concerned about misinformation being spread about players and coaches and their ability to do their job," he said. "It becomes a distraction that you have to deal with." Now an analyst for CBS, Casserly takes an hour-and-a-half train once a week to NFL Films headquarters in Mt. Laurel, N.J. just to watch the All-22 film.
Lonnie Marts, a former linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars, says there are thousands of former NFL players who could easily pick apart play-calling and player performance if they had access to this film. "If you knew the game, you'd know that sometimes there's a lot of bonehead plays and bonehead coaching going on out there," he says.
After he retired, Marts says he wanted to talk about the Jaguars on a radio show, so he contacted the video guy from the Jaguarsגwho was a friendגand asked for a couple of game tapes. Marts says he never heard from the guy again.
The NFL makes a handful of plays from the All 22 available on its web site for a fee, but they're often so blurry the players' numbers aren't visible. Earlier this month, the league quietly asked fans, through a survey site, whether they would pay up to $100 to watch an online feed of the All 22.
News of the survey made its way to NFL message boards and fan sites, where the response among football obsessives was wildly positive. "Yes! Yes! Yes!" said one message-board post. Another said, "The All-22 tape would be amazing. We'd actually be able to see what the safeties are doing."
On a Buffalo Bills fan site called "The Buffalo Range," one message-board member said "I've been dying for them to release it for years. Please help me stuff the ballot box."
The NFL says the league wasn't actually serious about releasing the footage. The survey was meant only to gauge fan interest, Aiello says. "There's not a product in development," he says. "This is a long way from becoming a reality, if ever."
