MIKE TIRICO: I'm Mike Tirico, so good to be joined by the executive produce of Sunday Night Football and the game producer for Super Bowl LVI, Fred Gaudelli. For Fred, it is your seventh Super Bowl, so I guess that's 1/8th of all Super Bowl broadcasts you've been the game producer. We're going to talk about the intersection of the Olympics and the Super Bowl in a minute, but I want to drill down on the game broadcast and what it's like for you guys, how it's changed along the way, and the enjoyment for you of being together for a seventh Super Bowl with the same director.
FRED GAUDELLI: Well, to answer the question how it's changed, it's just gotten bigger, if that's possible, but it is. When I think about our first Super Bowl together back in San Diego in February of 2003 to what we're going to be doing in SoFi, it's much bigger in every way possible.
To have your best friend sitting next to you in one of the great moments in sports and having been able to do it seven times is like seven blessings. It's been a great run for Drew and I, and we couldn't be more excited about this seventh Super Bowl.
And I think it's a lot like how Belichick must have felt about Brady and Brady must have felt about Belichick, knowing that, hey, everything is going to be covered, no one is going to be rattled, we know how to do this.
And that's how I feel about working with Drew, and hopefully he feels the same way.
MIKE TIRICO: Any of us who have the chance to be around you and travel with Sunday Night crew for a bit, finish each other's sentences and enjoy dinners together for three days a week for 20-plus weeks a year, it is a special connection, and the viewers are the ones who get to benefit from that.
So we are back to L.A. for the Super Bowl. We go back to the roots of the Super Bowl, really, in Super Bowl I, but it's been a long time, almost 30 years since the Bills and Cowboys in Pasadena. How will SoFi Stadium, and Los Angeles in general, be a part of everything that is Super Bowl Sunday on NBC?
FRED GAUDELLI: Well, start out with the open, Mike, because we had this idea, we hatched it, actually, during the pandemic in the spring of 2020, to do an open that kind of merged Hollywood and the Super Bowl, and we were able to get Halle Berry to be the host of this open, and it's a lot of movie clips of famous football movies. It's obviously some Super Bowl clips and some really great cameos by Hollywood actors and Super Bowl luminaries.
So we start with that. That's how -- that's how the 6 o'clock show, the kickoff show, which leads right into the game, that's how that begins.
SoFi is a magnificent architecture structure, and we show that off. If you want to say L.A. proper, I believe the last Super Bowl in L.A. proper would have been Miami and Washington when Miami completed the perfect season back in 1973.
So there will definitely be a Los Angeles flavor that not only will be reflected in our graphic look but sprinkled in throughout the broadcast of the game.
MIKE TIRICO: That will include the pregame as well. Those hours leading up to the broadcast will have very much a feel of Los Angeles and Southern California as one of America's iconic cities gets to host our biggest sports day.
I want to get to the game. A question you get around this time, number of cameras, microphones, graphics, anything different you add to the normal complement of what you guys bring for every Sunday night?
FRED GAUDELLI: We will have added equipment, obviously. I can't tell you the number of cameras right now, not because it's so enormous, but, you know, we feel like we do the Super Bowl every Sunday night. So the cameras we add for this are really to capture situations. So more goal line cameras, more cameras shooting down the sideline, cameras shooting down the end line in case there's a question of their receiver stepped out of bounds before he caught a pass.
So it's more to make sure there are no unanswered questions, we have all the critical looks. And that's how we approach the game from the camera standpoint. We'll have a brand-new graphics package and a really cool virtual package that for the first time we'll be using a steady cam and using what they call the Infinity screen, that awesome scoreboard that hangs in SoFi. We will be using that as a graphic display tool for some of our virtual graphics.
So we'll have a nice -- we'll have a nice bag of toys, no question about it. But as you know and I know, it comes down to how you cover the critical moments of the game. And while I want to make the game feel like a spectacle, and we will, I'm more concerned about how we're going to cover those critical moments of the game.
MIKE TIRICO: Just think of the catch in the end zone with the Steelers and Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII, think of Malcolm Butler at the goal line against the Patriots with the Seahawks. Those are the moments that matter the most to fans and that you've been in the chair for, among others.
There's nothing bigger than Super Bowl Sunday except when you put it right in the middle of the Olympics and you sandwich the biggest day in American sports with biggest event in the sports world, the Olympic Games. So how, from your perspective, in the lead-up and the execution, has the Olympics been a part of the Super Bowl planning?
FRED GAUDELLI: Well, we've been meeting together, Molly Solomon and her team and Tommy Roy and myself and a lot of other folks involved in the Super Bowl, we've been meeting since the summertime about this day.
If you're an NBC employee, it's one of the great days in the history of sports. I think the marketing campaign says once-in-a-lifetime, and that's what it is for this Sunday, February 13th, once-in-a-lifetime.
What I like about it the most is, I think you're like me, Mike, we like team, we like playing on great teams, and these are of the greatest teams in our business, the Olympic team, the Sunday Night team. And to have all those people together work together on this unprecedented day, that gets me jazzed.
MIKE TIRICO: Same here. I'm lucky enough to work with both teams on the Super Bowl pregame and hosting our coverage of the Olympics right after, so I get to be the automatic quarterback on two great teams. It's like the sandlot dream on the biggest stage possible coming to life.
And we'll have that Olympic coverage with a live Gold Medal skating event and bobsledding for women, where a couple of Americans have a great chance to win medals, right after the Super Bowl. So it's right from the trophy presentation back to our set outside of SoFi, weather permitting, the chance to bring everyone some great Olympic coverage as well. We can't wait. I know you're excited about the Super Bowl. And once we get the matchup, we'll be planning feverishly for February 13th.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports