NBC Sunday Night Football - Graphics

Graphics

NBC's Sunday Night Football graphics, logos and scoreboard were designed by Troika Design Group, along with the city skyline graphics used in the introductions to both Football Night in America and the game itself. It was effectively the first time the network used permanent time/score boxes throughout any of their sports broadcasts outside of Olympic Games broadcasts, where permanent scoring displays were compulsory; previous to 2006 the network continued the previous mode of score presentation of flashing the score on-screen for a short time every few minutes or so seen in American sports broadcasting until Fox's 1994 introduction of constant scoring displays.

NBC's game telecasts use the same type of bottom-line scoreboard that Monday Night Football used in the 2005 NFL season (and was subsequently used by ABC Sports until its rebranding in August 2006). After its debut, the graphics also began to be phased in across other NBC Sports properties, including its coverage of Notre Dame football and the annual Bayou Classic game (which uses the exact graphics used on SNF broadcasts), National Hockey League coverage (which uses the SNF graphics but with a scoreboard on the top), and tennis and golf (which use a modified version influenced by the look, but with bolder text for readability purposes). NBC's Olympics coverage continues to use a different package mixed between NBC's graphics and those of the IOC's world feed. The NBC football graphics are also used, in some form or another, on certain local preseason telecasts carried by the network's stations who are the flagship stations to NFL teams (such as New York Giants preseason games on WNBC, and the Minnesota Vikings on KARE-TV).

NBC's bottom-line scoring banner underwent a significant revamp for the 2009 season. The revamped banner debuted during the network's Super Bowl XLIII coverage on February 1, 2009. The changes included presenting downs and yardage in a feather derived from NBC's famous peacock logo in the colors of the team currently on offense. Also, when a team scores a touchdown, the banner will open, the team's logo and initials will slide to the left of the banner and "TOUCHDOWN" is displayed in the remainder of the banner. After a few moments, the banner will show the drive information. Then the banner returns to normal and show the change in the team's score. Additionally (beginning with Week 9), timeout indicators were added below each team's respective scores. For the 2010 season, the timeout indicators were changed to 3 white trapezoids below the team abbreviations, and the play clock was moved from above the team in possession of the football to above the game clock (for the final 2 minutes of regulation and if necessary, overtime). The down markers also changed in 2010, which is now featuring the team logo next to the down marker.

On January 2, 2012 during the NHL Winter Classic (with a sneak two days before during a Notre Dame hockey game on Versus), the graphics of all of NBC Sports' productions were updated to a new package intended to unify the graphical image between both the network and the rebranded NBC Sports Network, which relaunched that same day. Subsequently on Wild Card Saturday (January 7), the network's NFL presentation was changed to the new graphical styling to match the style and layout of the recently-christened NBC Sports Network. Most of the banner's styling remains the same, but with a cleaner and larger font for readability and a more neutral NBC logo to the left rather than the "aggressive peacock" used since 2006. Elements such as team and individual player stats take on team colors (main color as the background, secondary color as the accent), and the down/yardage/possession graphic also takes on team coloring, with neutral team comparison stats and other elements having a gold/blue/black coloring. Additionally, the play clock appears directly above the game clock throughout the entire game.