Studio Shows

Numbers Never Lie presents football-focused “Whiteboard Special” tonight

Numbers Never Lie is helping viewers prepare for the upcoming football season with tonight’s first-ever “Whiteboard Special” (ESPN, 7 p.m. ET). The football-focused special will be breaking down all the numbers you need to know for this year’s NFL and college season in NNL’s signature “whiteboard” style.

Co-hosts Michael Smith and Jemele Hill will be in studio with a custom set that resembles a whiteboard, where they will present various videos looking at topics such as “why the Seahawks will repeat” and “the end of SEC dominance” with Alabama head coach Nick Saban.

Coordinating producer Whit Albohm spoke to Front Row as he and his team prepared for the show.

Why did NNL’s football special decide to go with the “whiteboard” look?
As a production team, we are constantly looking to try new things. The whiteboards have been a great franchise for us and we have always wanted to do more with them. This is a nice next step. Once we had the idea of doing a special devoted to our whiteboards, [coordinating director] Alex Tyner had the idea of creating this whiteboard set for the show to bring it to life.

What are the challenges of doing a half-hour show in such a fashion?
The whiteboards take a decent amount of time to make. We typically produce one a week during the football season so the team had to have an organized and aggressive game plan in place to produce nine for this special. There were also some interesting technical challenges that the team faced in presenting a set that is entirely white.

Why do you think the whiteboard style works for viewers?
The whiteboards are a unique vehicle to share next level analytics and statistics with our viewers. An abundance of numbers can be hard to consume on TV at times so the hope is that the whiteboards make them a little more fun – a hat tip to their creator [and coordinating producer] Kevin Wildes.

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