Metrics for Assessing the Quality of NFL Announcers

Abstract

Announcers are one of the most important factors that can affect viewers’ enjoyment of televised sports. Discovering metrics for announcer quality would be useful for predicting future announcer performance and possibly lead to improvement of announcers. The authors tried to extract useful metrics for announcer quality by using behavioral coding of American football game videos. Initial data was gathered by watching the first half of twelve NFL football games of CBS, ESPN, NBS, and FOX, and metrics were compared with the number of viewers of the different channels. While non-weighted metrics had no correlation with the number of viewers, weighting the metrics showed that announcers’ excitement building, context building, and real-time visual analysis have the strongest potential correlation with viewers’ enjoyment.