Cris Collinsworth now has a broadcasting studio in Cincinnati befitting his status as one of the nation’s premier sportscasters.
Collinsworth’s PFF, the sports data and analysis company previously known as Pro Football Focus, has doubled its space in its Over-the-Rhine headquarters building on Central Parkway. The expansion into the previously unused half of the building was done largely to give PFF a much larger and greatly improved studio, CEO Neil Hornsby told me.
“We only had a little box before and we wanted something much better and more functional,” Hornsby told me as he gave me and Courier photographer Corrie Schaffeld a tour to unveil the new space to the masses.
The new studio is used not just by Collinsworth but others at PFF for the company’s 10 or so weekly podcasts that feature video. The podcasts, available on PFF’s YouTube channel, include NFL forecasts, fantasy football and college football insight. Collinsworth does one per week. You can see his interview with San Francisco 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman here.
That part of the business is a big deal for PFF. Its YouTube channel has 109,000 subscribers.
The studio features space for three cameras to shoot different angles. It has a graphic background that can be changed at the push of a button from Paul Brown Stadium and the Cincinnati skyline to graphics of the show hosts, PFF logos or other sports backdrops. The studio has a green screen that can be used to add other backgrounds.
“This is one of the best studios available anywhere in Cincinnati outside of the TV stations,” Hornsby said. “It’s a massive upgrade. It’s absolutely fabulous.”
The previous studio had been about one-eighth the size of PFF’s current studio. It had space for one camera. And it didn’t have a separate control room, just controls that were positioned outside of the studio.
“Cris was happy to use that because he wanted to help out,” Hornsby said. “But I told him, ‘That can’t be great for your image.’”
Collinsworth, the former Cincinnati Bengals star wide receiver and current NBC Sports “Sunday Night Football” broadcaster, is majority owner of PFF. He uses its data and analysis on his Sunday night game broadcasts. All 32 NFL teams pay to use its data and analysis, as do 87 college football programs that are clients and the nine Canadian Football League teams.
PFF employs a team of experts to evaluate each play in NFL games – and most college football games – and grade players.
PFF has changed its brand name after beginning to add soccer and rugby this year. It’s adding the top European soccer leagues as well as Major League Soccer in the U.S. It chose those sports because of a similarity to football when it comes to analysis.
“Football is the most complex sport,” he said, pointing to the number of players taking a variety of actions at one time. “Soccer and rugby are similar in that they have a lot of complexity.”
Those additions are a big reason PFF expects to increase its employment by one-third next year. Hornsby said he’s budgeting for 134 employees by the end of 2021, up from about 100 now.
“It could be even more by then,” he said. “it’s mostly driven by our new ventures.”
PFF will eventually have its logo atop the building on Central Parkway and will continue to use PFF in other branding, Hornsby told me.
