Charting the Mountaineers
November 15, 2006 11:42 PM | General
November 16, 2006
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| Tony Caridi |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Have you ever wondered how radio and television announcers seem to have all of the pertinent facts right at the tip of their tongue. The reason is simple: it’s all laid out in front of them.
MSN’s Tony Caridi admits he spends about four to five hours preparing for a football broadcast, detailing all of his notes and statistics on two legal-sized pieces of paper he prints out and pastes on foam board.
“I would have a nightmare if I did not have my charts done before a game,” Caridi said. “It would be like going into a test without studying.”
Caridi says spotting boards can vary. He got the idea for his after taking a look at Dick Endberg’s charts at the 1989 Fiesta Bowl.
“He had these very big ones during a time when computers weren’t in vogue,” Caridi said. “He would hand-write everything. What I am using I designed myself on Page Maker.”
Caridi’s spotting board is pretty simple to understand.
“Everything in red is current and pertinent information,” he said. “Blue is more of a note of information. If you look at Steve Slaton, you’ll see 181 C. The C stands for carries. L stands for long play of the year and R is obviously for receptions.
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| Tony's spotting board is color coded to help him identify pertinent information.
Submitted photo |
“Inside their box where it says 12 TDs … that’s 12 rushing touchdowns. Zero TDs means no receiving touchdowns.”
Caridi uses alternate colors like greens and purples just to draw his attention to something other than the most pertinent stats.
“Those are less significant stats,” he said. “Green is mostly generic pieces of information usually referencing their high school career.”
Caridi's longtime spotter Jeff "Soup" Campbell uses push-pins to identify who is in the game. Offense and defense are opposite each other and Soup simply flips over the board on a change of possession.
Because the information for each broadcast has to be up to date, Caridi very rarely works ahead unless he’s pressed for time.
“I’ve got a huge week coming up here with three basketball games and the South Florida football game,” he said. “I did start the Pitt chart the Saturday after the Louisville game but the Panthers still had to play against Connecticut the following week. So I had to wait for that game to be played before I could put the updated numbers in.”
Because so much work goes into each team, Caridi often grimaces when Sports Information Directors give him a bunch of changes right before the game.
“It’s always better to have than not to have,” he says.
Caridi admits he could probably get by without having such elaborate charts but he believes the security of having the extra information is beneficial.
“I just don’t have the guts to go into a broadcast without being prepared,” he said. “I think that maybe 20 percent of this information is used in a broadcast. Eighty percent of it never gets on the air.”
Part of the reason for that has to do with Rich Rodriguez’s no-huddle offense he uses at West Virginia. There is simply very little time between plays.
“The way West Virginia plays it doesn’t lend itself to using the information because they play without a huddle and it eliminates a lot of the information you have because they play so fast,” Caridi said. “If a kid gets hurt and he’s on the ground then you have the opportunity to finally blow it all out.”
Caridi recalls a couple of instances when he was broadcasting national radio games and his partner had done very little preparation and began using his notes on the air.
“The only thing he brought with him in his briefcase was a telescope to take stuff off my charts,” Caridi laughed. “Dwight Wallace (football analyst) and Jay Jacobs (basketball analyst) both do an incredible job of preparing.”
Caridi’s wife Joan often jokes that his charts are the only things he cares about.
“It’s the only thing I get stressed out about are my charts,” he admits.
So what happens to all of his hard work after the game? Did he have to create an addition to his house to store all that information?
“No, I just throw them away after the game is over,” he said. “I would have loved to have saved some of them because there are some incredible players on some of those charts.”
You can download a copy of Tony’s chart for Thursday night’s game against Pitt by CLICKING HERE.
