Whether it is participating in the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain or swimming between two tectonic plates in Iceland, Scott Hanson is a thrill-seeker.
Having visited six of the seven world continents, seeing new places and being exposed to different cultures gives him the ability to live his life to the fullest and take advantage of many unique opportunities. That adventurous style of travel, though, takes a back seat when it is football season. As the host of the Sunday whiparound show NFL RedZone, Hanson and the NFL Network team notoriously bring fans every touchdown from every game in seven hours of commercial-free football.
No commercial breaks mean Hanson is hosting a program straight from 1:00-8:00 PM EST every day, requiring high levels of stamina and endurance. It is part of the reason why he works out five days a week during the regular season, cognizant of the perceived connection between maintaining good physical fitness and sharp mental acuity. For a hosting job that may seem interminable to some, Hanson revels in it and arrives at the brand-new state-of-the-art NFL Network studios adjacent to SoFi Stadium, the shared home of the Los Angeles Chargers and Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, Calif., excited and ready to immerse himself in the day’s action.
“I literally will be on the elliptical machine on the treadmill saying, ‘The last 10 minutes of this one-hour session is for the sixth hour of NFL RedZone‘,” Hanson explained. “I’ve still got to have that energy [and] enthusiasm. It might sound silly, but I really do believe that.”
From an early age, Hanson knew he wanted to work as a broadcaster in sports media, especially when he recognized that attaining a professional football career was highly unlikely to happen. Motivated to follow in the footsteps of the broadcasters living out his dream job of being paid to travel the country and interact with players, coaches and other team personnel, he attended Syracuse University and majored in communication studies. Four years later, he graduated cum laude, achieved Dean’s List status for all four years at school and also continued to play on the school football team.
In fact, his collegiate football career – which started by winning a roster spot as a walk-on long snapper and playing as a wide receiver and defensive back as a member of the scout team – concluded with a 1993 Fiesta Bowl win over the University of Colorado Boulder’s Buffaloes.
After completing a college summer internship with WXYZ-TV in Southfield, Mich. where he had the chance to work with the late-broadcaster Don Shane, Hanson was even more committed to finding a way to succeed in sports media. Upon his graduation, he started his professional journey working as an anchor and reporter for WPBN-TV in Traverse City, Mich. in 1993.
After an additional stop to work at WICS-TV in Springfield, Ill. in 1994, Hanson made the move to Tampa to cover the Buccaneers as a reporter. This marked his first time working in a role associated with covering a specific football team per se – the game he was enamored with growing up in Rochester, Mich.
While playing football at the high school level, Hanson served as the team’s captain and also earned all-conference honors; however, pursuing a career in sports media, although challenging, always appealed to him. He served as a public address announcer for the women’s soccer team in high school and sought to gain as many repetitions as possible as a broadcaster to hone his craft and diversify his skill set, recognizing the importance of versatility in the industry.
Hanson put that versatility on display when he landed a job as the intermission reporter for the National Hockey League’s Philadelphia Flyers at Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. Closely following the team during its days with star players Jeremy Roenick, Keith Primeau and Eric Desjardins, Hanson observed the differences between how football and hockey players conduct themselves and interact with the media.
“Hockey guys will do interviews differently than football guys will do it, generally speaking,” Hanson said, “and yet they are still uber-competitive, highly-skilled, world-class athletes, and there’s a certain mentality that comes with that [which] often displays itself while you’re interviewing them.”
After working in Bethesda, Md. for the next four years as an anchor and reporter with Comcast SportsNet Atlantic, Hanson joined NFL Media in 2006 as a national reporter. Every week, Hanson would attend National Football League contests and provide pregame and postgame reports. The only problem was that Hanson found himself following all the action around the National Football League even when he was in the press box for games, discussing action with journalists and media members other than what was taking place on the field down below.
“I would be the guy always looking at everything else going on in the NFL even though I had one live game in front of me,” Hanson said. “I guess I was wired for an NFL RedZone-style show from the beginning.”
Coinciding with the proliferation in fans creating fantasy football teams, NFL Network created what has been referred to as “the best invention since television” in NFL RedZone and tabbed Hanson to be its host after he had previously hosted other studio programming for the network in 2008.
While there is another version of the whiparound-style program called DIRECTV Sunday Ticket RedZone hosted by Andrew Siciliano since its launch in 2005, and available exclusively to NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers. Hanson is the host of the version produced by NFL Network, and once he learned of the opportunity to pioneer the program from “the captain’s seat” and heard more about the vision of the broadcast from network executives, he was euphoric to get started.
“I absolutely believed that the show would be a galactic success if we could execute [in] the way [with] the vision displayed out there,” Hanson recalled. “They came to me and said: ‘Hey, we’re starting a show from scratch. We’re going to show every touchdown from every game. We’re going to do it for the early window and the late window, so it’s going to go seven hours long. We’re not going to show any commercials and we’re going to bounce around and show people the best of the NFL.’ And I said: ‘Sign me up and put me in front of that camera.’”
Hanson stands in front of a plethora of television monitors featuring a well-orchestrated cacophony of game action occurring around the country. While scientific research has proven the impossibility in truly multi-tasking, additional research suggests approximately 2.5% of people can do it effectively. It is more than likely Hanson falls within that select group, regularly multi-tasking outside of the seven-hour window he hosts NFL RedZone on Sundays. He has five high-definition television screens set up in his home that simultaneously play a wide assortment of programming from sports to entertainment to news.
While it may seem dizzying to some to be closely following over half of the National Football League at once, it is simply all in a day’s work for Hanson. From the moment he returns home after a studio taping of NFL RedZone, his preparation for the next week begins – first by watching Sunday Night Football. Afterwards, he will tune in to all of the major football highlight shows, including those from NFL Network and ESPN, to ensure his broadcast did not miss any significant moments in the action or associated storylines. If he happens to hear information that is transferable to the following week’s broadcast, he makes a note of it and implements it as a part of his preparation.
The next day, Monday Night Football takes center stage, closing out the week of football and leading into the next day’s release of the weekly NFL Media research packet. The document, which ranges from 100 to 200 pages in length, contains facts, statistics and other relevant information compiled by the NFL Media research team. Hanson closely examines the contents of the document and begins to memorize parts of it he may want to use during the NFL RedZone show on Sunday.
On Wednesdays, Hanson begins creating spreadsheets complete with information about all positions and various game scenarios, including possessions taking place in the red zone. It is vital information he needs to be able to quickly recollect during the course of the broadcast.
“The rest of it is just studying and trying to memorize and then digging down into each individual game matchup that will be on RedZone [for that] Sunday,” Hanson said. “….I probably don’t do as much research as [Joe] Buck does for one individual game on all of my 11 games, but I probably do as many hours leading into it for the 11 games [in the] early and late window that we’ll have on Sunday.”
Hanson does not have a favorite NFL team, although he grew up closest in proximity to the Detroit Lions, and genuinely does not have a rooting interest in terms of who wins or loses specific football games every week. Having said that, his fantasy football team – nicknamed the “Iron Bladders” – consists of players from across the NFL and he will sometimes display his fandom during NFL RedZone broadcasts about their specific performance, although he affirms it will not interfere with his hosting responsibilities on the show.
“I do not care who wins any given NFL game, but I do care that the game is action-packed and dramatic and provides us with some moments that we will remember during the seven hours of the show,” he said, “and provide us with some moments that we’ll be talking about at our workplaces [all week] leading back into the next episode of NFL RedZone.”
As an on-air host, Hanson’s top priority is to be a source of information for fans tuning in to the broadcast who are looking to get a complete scope on what is occurring around the league. The show’s commitment to showing every touchdown from every game holds true as it did from its initial launch in 2009, but as time has gone on, Hanson has been able to find moments to insert humor, opinion and other differentiating factors associated with being on the air.
“I’m naturally energetic, naturally enthusiastic and I love the game of football,” Hanson said. “I hope that comes across to all the people that are watching all over the world on NFL RedZone; that if you don’t know anything about [me] personally, you would still say: ‘Yeah, I’d like to sit down and watch a game and have a beer with that guy. It sounds like he loves the game and he sees the game the way I see the game.’”
Being that Hanson watches every NFL game on Sunday, along with ESPN’s presentation of Monday Night Football and Amazon Prime Video’s streaming-exclusive Thursday Night Football game every week, he believes in the strength of football as a consumer product in terms of its dissemination and quality, both on the field and inside the broadcast booth.
This previous offseason saw the movements of Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit to Amazon Prime Video, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman to ESPN, Mike Tirico’s elevation to the weekly play-by-play announcer on NBC’s Sunday Night Football and Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen forming the new primary booth on Fox – with seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady to eventually join as well. Among these and other changes, Hanson is encouraged about the future of football broadcasts and sports media in its entirety.
“A high tide raises all boats, they say, so I certainly am happy with the contracts that have been handed out to some of my on-air contemporaries,” Hanson expressed. “….I don’t think there’s a weak link in the national broadcasts today…. I love the fact that when it’s not NFL RedZone when I’m on the air, I have fantastic professionals to watch and enjoy as a fan [of] all of the national games.”
Just as fantasy sports rose in popularity in 2009, the phenomenon of sports betting has recently begun to grow coinciding with its legalization throughout nearly half of the country. Hanson attributes the survival of whiparound programs to the augmenting proclivity for fans to follow specific players and portions of the game action relevant to their own teams or bets rather than rooting solely for one team to win or lose. Nonetheless, the goal of the show to be a source of commercial-free football for seven hours every Sunday remains unchanged; the ways in which that goal is effectively accomplished has merely shifted with changes in consumption habits and emerging technologies.
“What I think we hopefully have gotten better at through the years is showing more action; being able to bounce around from stadium to stadium even quicker and slicker to make it an enjoyable viewing experience,” he expressed. “….I think social media has some ability to do quote-on-quote RedZone-style entertainment because the audience is choosing which link they click on; which clip they click on [using] Instagram; Twitter; TikTok; Facebook; whatever else it is.”
Other professional sports leagues have sought to emulate the type of program and staple NFL RedZone has become but whiparound-style programs simply do not work for every sport. For example, DAZN, in partnership with Major League Baseball, broadcast a whiparound program beginning in mid-2019 called ChangeUp. The show, which was hosted by Adnan Virk, Scott Rogowsky, Lauren Gardner and Tony Luftman, was canceled less than a year later after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and reportedly low viewership. Conversely, NBA CrunchTime has been broadcasting since 2015 on NBA TV, but will be added to the redesigned NBA League App for fans to stream.
According to Hanson, the game of football presents inherent differences that give it an advantage in presenting multiple games at once – such as the synchrony in kickoffs, 40-second play clock and sequencing of the game itself, along with the likelihood that crucial action favoring either the offense or defense will occur when play is within the 20-yard line – colloquially referred to as the “red zone.”
“We have eight games going on at one time on some Sundays where we can ping-pong to any one of those locations where the action is hot,” Hanson said. “You’re almost guaranteed that one or two of them have some drama going on at any given moment….. The fact that I can show you a game in Atlanta and I’ve got 40 seconds or thereabouts to show you something from Dallas and something from Green Bay and I can get back to Atlanta and you haven’t missed any material action in the Atlanta game – that helps.”
Some viewers of NFL RedZone or NFL Network as a whole might surmise that since the media outlet has a direct affiliation with the league, on-air talent and contributors may be more restricted in terms of what they can or cannot express. While it is evident that sports media is built on a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, it is up to hosts to establish a comfort zone in which they are able to deliver news and voice their opinions.
“I’ve been with the league for 16 years and while it’s clear they want me to be a fair broadcaster and they don’t want me taking shots at players or coaches or teams in an unfair manner, I am allowed to say what I want to say at any given moment,” Hanson said. “There have only been maybe two times in my 16 years where a boss of mine has come to me and said: ‘Hey Scott, why don’t you say this instead of this.’”
Aside from hosting NFL RedZone, Hanson serves as the in-stadium host for the Super Bowl each year, meaning that it is his job to entertain, inform and engage with fans attending “The Big Game.” It is a change from hosting studio coverage, giving him the ability to show fans different aspects of his skillset and vary how he infuses his personality into shorter segments of air time.
Additionally, he has had the chance to converse with some of the greatest football players to ever step foot onto the gridiron, including the aforementioned Brady, who told him that NFL RedZone was his favorite television program to watch on days he was not playing.
“I’ve been able to interview Michael Jordan and Mike Tyson back in his heyday,” Hanson added. “Just big-time, high-profile, world-class athletes; and that energizes me as someone who strives for excellence to be around people who exhibit excellence in their given profession.”
Hanson, akin to most other sports media personalities, works under a contract and while he could see himself hosting NFL RedZone for the remainder of his career, he is open to exploring any and all opportunities in media, the assimilation of sports notwithstanding. Cultivating the skills necessary to effectively host a top-rated sports whiparound program is no easy task, but it is something he has embraced over the years and continues to enjoy when he wakes up at 5 a.m. to go to work.
It takes a willingness to do whatever it takes to improve and gain experience in sports media, and Hanson advises aspiring broadcasters looking to work in the industry to take advantage of opportunities whenever or wherever they may be. Living on the edge is his modus operandi and has allowed him to build a successful career in the National Football League as a broadcaster rather than as a professional football player.
“Be willing to make sacrifices. It’s a very, very competitive business,” Hanson said. “If you’re trying to get into this business to become famous or make a ton of money or just [to] meet Peyton Manning, you’re going to have to pay your dues before any of that happens – and paying your dues means making sacrifices often. Be willing to move anywhere in the country where a job presents itself. Be willing to work whatever days, hours, holidays; anything else that your employer wants.”
