The AV Club has started to regularly cover some NFL action (although, due to their focus, they’re much more focused on the presentation and flow of how the games are presented on TV, rather than the games themselves) and they recently uncovered a cool little tidbit in their assessment of the graphical work on NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
After noting that the SNF graphics work is very clean and easily understood (an assessment which is unequivocally correct), the AV Club got down to the nitty gritty in judging the various infographics that NBC broadcasted during the Packers and Bears game. For instance, this Cutler and Rodgers graphic was ruled to be very good for how it neatly presented information statistically and through the images of the respective players.
Then the AV Club got to this image of Clay Matthews.
And perhaps because someone had to do it eventually, they began to decipher just what the minuscule text under “linebacker” actually said. Improbably, it’s not a list of Clay Matthews accomplishments or even the synopsis on Clay’s Wikipedia page. It’s really the opening paragraph of the NFL’s Wikipedia page.
It’s tiny, but you can barely make out “THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE (NFL) IS A PROFESSIONAL AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE COMPOSED OF 32 TEAMS…” and so on. Yup, NBC just pasted the first paragraph of the NFL entry on Wikipedia in there. Every Sunday night, the network subliminally televises this paragraph to an unsuspecting public, in an apparent attempt to indoctrinate those who are not already fans of the game.
Yes, each Sunday night, you are subtlety reminded of the fact that the National Football League is composed of 32 teams. And now, like the Fed Ex arrow, this will never be unseen ever again.
