Fox plans to only use virtual fans for only one Week 1 game, Chicago Bears vs. Detroit Lions, with hopes to use the technology on other games in the remaining weeks, according to Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. “We didn’t get a pre-season game on the NFL to do everything that we wanted to do and really look at it,” says Fox Sports' Brad Zager. “Before we rolled it out everywhere, we wanted to have a game that we could focus on, and we’ll see what happens from there.” Ourand reports NBC Sports decided it was too difficult and costly to create virtual fans for every angle of the 25 cameras that Sunday Night Football uses.
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HBO's Hard Knocks crew pulled off filming two NFL teams amid a pandemic with zero health setbacks: "The Hard Knocks @NFLFilms producers had to prepare for the very worst and were stepping into the great unknown," tweeted NFL Network's Peter Schrager. "The crew did not hang after work, barely left hotel rooms 1000s of miles away from home, and did not do edits together in person. And they pulled it off."
CBS' top NFL sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson explains how she'll do her job without being on the field: Wolfson will be in an isolated zone in the first row of the stands in what she calls "The Moat." "The biggest concern and logistical question is how do you get from one sideline to the other because this isn't a typical stadium," says Wolfson. "It's not like what you see in these college stadiums where you can just walk around the bowl. In New England (where Wolfson will be for Week 1) we have to go up and around and over. I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for us is going from one side of the stadium to the other and make sure we don't miss anything."