Despite a series of lopsided blowouts last season, NBC’s Sunday Night Football still ranked tops on fall TV for the fifth straight year, with an average of more than 20 million viewers. This year, with down-to-the-wire finishes in three of its first five contests, Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth and company are getting on-field fireworks to match all the glitz and hype that go along with the broadcast. Not surprisingly, SNF has been the top-rated show every Sunday since football season began last month.

SNF has long been touted for its superb production and spectacular graphics packages. As Deadspin’s John Koblin put it in a feature story a few years back, “There is no denying the overall crispness of the production, the way everything looks and sounds sharper, the way it seems to see more than the other broadcasts.”

With the NFL season now in full swing, we caught up via email this week with award-winning SNF producer Fred Gaudelli and a few members of the Sunday Night production team to learn more about what goes into the quick-turnaround interstitials and highlight packages that play coming in and out of commercials and during breaks in the action.

A group of approximately 150 people, including cameramen and tech people on the ground, canvas the action at the stadium and in NBC’s production trucks. On site are two Final Cut Pro editing rooms dedicated to creating edited elements of the broadcast. Each week, the program’s editing team creates custom 3D elements using Cinema 4D and Apple Motion. These programs are used to make the show’s signature IDs, which combine green screen footage of players against an animated backdrop like a scenic vista.

“We like to think we are the Swiss army knife of pre-production for Sunday Night Football,” says editor Ryan Leimbach in an email response. “Our goal is to brand SNF and create distinctive elements that separate us from other live sports broadcasts.”

During the game broadcast, Leimbach, editor Mike Dowling and edit producer Mike Seib create three specialty rollouts and a halftime reset tease using highlights from the game. The edit room is connected to all of the broadcast’s replay units, giving the group immediate access to every camera angle.

“We focus on using cinematic shots of that game that aren’t seen during the regular telecast,” Dowling writes. “The challenge is combining speed with creativity. We’re often turning around polished, edited pieces using footage of a play that just happened moments earlier.”

That combination of dexterity and quickness take “oh-my-gawd!” moments, such as Odell Beckham’s acrobatic one-handed catch last year for the Giants, and elevate them to something iconic.

Gaudelli, widely regarded as one of the best producers in sports, built SNF into a ratings juggernaut after spending years producing Sunday Night Football on ESPN and Monday Night Football on ABC. Gaudelli says his team gets together every spring and summer to re-boot the broadcast from a design standpoint.

“The philosophy is to take ordinary information and elevate its presentation so that we distinguish ourselves from everyone else who produces sports,” Gaudelli writes. “Clean, classy and contemporary is what we aim for as well as making sure design doesn’t get in the way of functionality.”

Gaudelli is under no pretense that sleek production elements create through the roof ratings. The NFL’s product on the field does that, for better or worse, on its own. But he does believe a sleek, sharp-looking broadcast enhances the experience.

“I’d be hard-pressed to say it influences people’s viewing habits,” Gaudelli says. “But I do believe it raises their enjoyment factor.”

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