* Illustration: Jessica Hische * Glen Kolanco asks me to name a favorite moment in the history of professional football. I tell him, and he taps a few keys on a dual-monitor PC flanked by sports memorabilia. Seconds later a gorgeous slow-motion video of Chicago Bears wide receiver Devin Hester's opening kickoff return for a touchdown in Super Bowl XLI fills one whole screen. The clip is labeled "oh god!"
Kolanco summons up another MPEG clip tagged "oh god!" San Diego Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers drops back, ducks behind a lineman, and fires a pass. The camera tracks the ball as it drifts across the starry sky and drops sharply into the arms of receiver Malcolm Floyd in the end zone. It's seven seconds of everything that is perfect about football.
We're sitting in the headquarters of NFL Films, just east of Philadelphia. A few yards from Kolanco's desk is a vault containing the history of the sport. There are 10,000 canisters of film, everything from an 1894 Princeton vs. Rutgers game shot by Thomas Edison to highlights so revered that fans know them by nicknames like The Holy Roller, The Miracle at the Meadowlands, or simply The Catch. Each season, the collection grows by another thousand miles of 16-mm film.
NFL Films was started in 1962 by Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman and former vaudeville singer, who paid $3,000 for the rights to film the '62 championship game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. He was soon editing his footage into feature-length productions and screening them on bedsheets for Kiwanis and Rotary clubs. The stylistic hallmarks of NFL Films quickly emerged: slow-motion action, mic-wearing coaches, blooper reels, and melodramatic narration — "the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field." NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle loved the films so much that in 1964 he persuaded team owners to put up $20,000 each to purchase the company.
Ninety-two Emmys later, the $50 million company is run by Sabol's son, Steve. He employs close to 300 people, including two full-time composers, and has sent at least two camera operators to every regular and postseason game for 45 years.
"Keeping track of all that footage used to take logbooks, legal pads, even a corkboard," Kolanco says. Now there's an effort underway to digitize the entire library. Video loggers like Kolanco tag the footage with details from drop-down menus (team, date, yardage) and with keyword phrases like "funky fans," "torn uniform," and "oh god!" A team of color-correctors ensures that the blue on the '62 Giants uniforms matches the blue on the '82 Giants uniforms. So far, NFL Films has worked its way back to only 1992, but it's amassed 110 terabytes of data.
The company regularly mines the archive for commercial opportunities by locating clips of product close-ups (tagged "Nike" or "Motorola"). Today, I watch employees search for 2006 highlights for the designers of EA's* Madden NFL 08* videogame.
But the central value is for the NFL Network, a television channel dedicated to round-the-clock coverage of the sport. The tagged digital system makes it easy to assemble shows like Top Ten Pass Rushers. Watching a documentary with footage from almost five decades of NFL Films' output, you start to imagine that the Sabols are the reason football is the most-watched sport in America. "Before we started, the NFL had a tradition like baseball has a tradition," Steve Sabol says. "What we did was give football a mythology."
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