ESPN’s camera situation made Alabama and Arkansas look like ants playing football

The network’s safety policy led to an unusual viewing situation.

With severe weather in the Fayetteville area during Saturday’s Alabama-Arkansas game, ESPN removed some camera operators from their perches up high in Razorback Stadium. That left the network’s cameras with the best view of the field sitting stationary, creating an unusual TV viewing experience. The goal is to ensure camera operators’ safety.

This is what one common camera angle looked like at the start of the game:

And this is what a Bama extra point looked like:

When ESPN (or another network) broadcasts a game, standard practice is for the TV crew to have several manned cameras around field level and unmanned cameras elsewhere in the stadium. Usually, there’s an operator running at least some of the cameras perched up high in a stadium, including the one around the 50-yard line near press box level, which networks use as the primary lens to shoot every play of the game.

A rough transcript of play-by-play man Adam Amin’s explanation on air:

There is an ESPN protocol where if there’s lightning in the area within X amount of miles, we have to bring down our camera people that are high up, we have to take people away from dangerous positions, so there is a lot of thought that goes into that well beforehand, and the ops producer is typically the one who is in charge of most if not all of that.

He added:

Our official partner is AccuWeather, so based on whatever AccuWeather’s radar says, if there is a lightning strike within whatever that range of mileage is, our ops producer will tell our producer, hey, we gotta break these people down, we can’t do this, we have to bring them out. So, the producer or the director will tell the camera people, ‘Hey guys, we have a weather issue, we need you guys to hop off the cameras and get out.

The policy produces some funny-looking shots of the game, but that’s a nothing price to pay for the people broadcasting the game to not be in danger.