No brakes, no breaks: An exhilarating, exhausting NFL Sunday with RedZones Scott Hanson

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Thirty-nine minutes into the early window and he’s yet to sit, yet to break, yet to breathe. Scott Hanson is bobbing back and forth, a human pendulum tracking eight football games at once. He’s stretching his right quad. He’s humming the theme to “Top Gun.” He’s shouting at the control room “GUYS, WHY ARE WE NOT THERE?” and “WHAT’S NEXT? GO!” and then it’s time, time to talk to a million people, so he dives into three separate highlights from three separate games, ad-libbing each back-to-back-to-back, all within a span of 25 seconds, all without prep or pause.

Maybe most staggering: Amid all of the moving parts, the man doesn’t get a single name wrong. Doesn’t even utter a single “um.” He’s making this look easy, and it is most certainly not.

“I’m Indiana Jones on the suspension bridge,” Hanson says later. “The bad guys sawed off the edge, the bridge is collapsing, and you can’t stop. They’re handing me these highlights a millisecond before they go out to a million people.”

It’s his job not to screw it up.

He’s come to crave the rush that Sundays bring, and over the 13 years he’s hosted NFL RedZone — NFL Network’s whiparound Sunday spectacle that, as the slogan goes, “shows every touchdown from every game” — Hanson has become a bit of a cult figure. They spoofed him on SNL. He’s done a voiceover for “The Simpsons.” He’s buds with Tim Tebow and goes to church with Justin Bieber. “Hey Scott,” Tom Brady told him once, pulling him aside at a Super Bowl, “I just wanna tell you that you do a hell of a job. RedZone’s easily my favorite show on TV.”

“I get to be P.T. Barnum welcoming people to the greatest show on earth,” Scott Hanson says of hosting RedZone each of the last 13 years. (Ben Liebenberg / Associated Press)

Ditto for most of football-watching America. Over the years, Hanson’s heard that RedZone is usually on one of the TVs on Sundays at the White House. He can only chuckle at the show’s absurd popularity.

“Sex is great,” one joke goes, “but have you tried NFL RedZone?”

Another: “Watching NFL RedZone is like watching football, except if God had the remote.”

A few years back, in a grocery store parking lot, Hanson was loading his bags into his trunk when a man he didn’t know started screaming at him. “Give it to me! Give it to me!” the man yelled. Hanson looked around, confused.

Give him what?

Then it hit him. He wanted the line.

“SEVEN HOURS OF COMMERCIAL-FREE FOOTBALL … START NOW!” Hanson shouted.

The man’s face beamed.

“He hoisted his arms up like he’d scored a touchdown,” Hanson, 50, says with a laugh. “And I knew I’d be telling that story for years.”

Hanson’s show is actually the second iteration of RedZone; the DirecTV version hosted by his NFL Network colleague Andrew Siciliano started a few years earlier, but it’s Hanson who’s most often associated with the format. He gets stopped everywhere. Some fans have told him that hearing that sentence — “SEVEN HOURS…” — gives them a Pavlovian response. Others have asked him to record versions of it for their weddings, birthdays and bar mitzvahs (Hanson’s Cameo fee: $222 for personal use, $1,800 for businesses).

“I love being in this studio, I love being in control,” he says. “At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have a healthy ego about this being the one-stop shop for everyone that wants to know everything about the NFL. And there’s no one in the United States that wants to show people football more than I do.”

Thirty seconds before the show’s 213th episode, Hanson is standing behind a podium and in front of a giant green screen inside Studio 4 at the NFL Network’s swanky new Southern California home. It’s Nov. 7. Week 9. Hanson’s got a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face. He starts screaming “Let’s go!” like he’s Brady running on the field before kickoff.

“I get to be P.T. Barnum welcoming people to the greatest show on earth,” he says.

It’s time.

Here’s what it’s like:

(All times are Pacific, with the early kickoffs starting at 10 a.m.)

4:58 a.m.: Hanson gets no more than five hours of sleep most Saturday nights during the season, mainly because he’s too amped for the day ahead. Even for a 5 a.m. wake-up, he rarely needs an alarm clock. His eyes open early, and he’ll watch the digits crawl from 4:58 to 4:59 to …

He’s out the door in 20 minutes and off to the studio.

He spends Saturdays at home poring through almost 200 pages of notes, cheat sheets he’ll need to know cold come Sunday afternoon. When you’re calling eight games at once, and typically 12 in all, names and stats and trends are vital. Hanson won’t have time to look them up when he’s on the air and the play is happening and the audience is waiting.

He’s Indiana Jones on the suspension bridge. He’s gotta go.

While he studies, Hanson will have his five flat-screen TVs — yes, five — all turned to college football games.

“It can be 80 and sunny, all of my buddies are playing volleyball at the beach, and I won’t leave the house.”

6:45 a.m.: Same breakfast, same time, every Sunday, thanks to Chef Gabe in the NFL Network cafeteria. Hanson is a man of unshakeable routine: scrambled egg whites, a turkey burger patty (no bun), a bowl of mixed fruit, a blueberry muffin and — most essential — a side of Kalamata olives. The saltier, the better.

Why?

Because the rumors are true.

Hanson will be live for seven consecutive hours … and he won’t use the restroom. Not once. He refuses, lest a touchdown happen and he’s not ready to call it. Over the last eight years — that’s nearly 130 shows — he’s slipped up once. It was such a noteworthy event that “Pardon the Interruption” opened its next show with the shocking news.

The Kalamata olives help him retain liquid. Hanson will down a Diet Pepsi after breakfast, spooning out the carbonation. “I don’t want any bubbles in me,” he explains. “I’ll never get caught burping during an Ezekiel Elliot touchdown run.” He’s not a fan of coffee and never has been, not since he was in the fourth grade and accidentally took a sip from his teacher’s cup and immediately spit it out. “Dirt water,” he calls it.

He’ll take his last drink of water around 7:15 a.m. and won’t step foot in a bathroom for eight hours.

“Insane,” he calls it.

Over the years, it’s become part of his schtick — “the bathroom thing,” is how Hanson refers to it. He named his fantasy team the Iron Bladders. It’s usually the first question he gets asked in interviews. One year, at a Super Bowl, a man who introduced himself as a surgeon came up to him, desperate to know if it was true. “All seven hours?” he asked. “Really?” Hanson nodded. Turns out, the doctor did the same thing during lengthy operations, not wanting to take his scrubs off, clean them, then put them back on. “You can do it!” he told Hanson. “The bladder is a muscle. You can train it!”

“I lean into it,” Hanson admits. “Look, I studied at Syracuse, the best broadcast school in the country. I graduated with honors. I worked my way up in the business. But if my legacy in television is being the man with the most bladder integrity, I can live with that.”

Scott Hanson and his RedZone researchers, Tim Guilanians (left) and Bryan Larrivee, follow the action on eight screens at once. (Zak Keefer / The Athletic)

9:59 a.m.: The production meeting has wrapped, Hanson has reviewed his notes, and it’s go time. He bounces back and forth. He screams like Tom Brady. He’s ready. This is a man in his element, cool and confident, unfazed by the unpredictability that awaits.

“I have not been nervous in years,” he says as the countdown begins.

Five, four, three, two, one …

Before the show goes live across the country, I ask Hanson’s longtime producer, Allan Flowers, if he could imagine doing RedZone with anyone else.

“At this point?” Flowers says, letting the thought hang in the air for a moment. “No.”

Then Hanson is off and running, rolling through the only scripted portion of the entire seven hours he’ll be on the air. He spends two minutes setting the stage for the early games, then ambles away from the podium and over to the spot he’ll spend the rest of his afternoon: watching eight screens at once, standing next to his two indispensable stat researchers, Tim Guilanians and Bryan Larrivee. Hanson will have Brian Nettles, his primary producer, in his left ear, ready to come to him whenever a team advances inside the 20-yard line or scores a touchdown.

10:25 a.m.: “No!” Hanson shouts off the air. The Dolphins’ Myles Gaskin has scored a 6-yard touchdown, and Hanson is beside himself.

What gives?

“It’s not like I hate Myles Gaskin,” he says. “But I left him on my fantasy bench today.”

Could be a long day for the Iron Bladders.

10:41 a.m.: Out of solidarity — and quite possibly stupidity — I decided to see how long I can last. To accurately write about Scott Hanson, I convince myself, one must live the Scott Hanson experience. No bathroom breaks, I tell myself. No food. No drink.

Forty minutes in, he hasn’t even touched his water.

10:49 a.m.: Your RedZone vocabulary cheat sheet:

“On the runway”: a highlight is packaged and ready to go whenever there’s a break in the action.

“Octobox, quadbox, doublebox”: The terms Hanson uses when eight, four and two games are on the screen simultaneously.

“Trigger finger”: Hanson’s way of telling Nettles he wants them to jump to another game the minute it’s back from commercial. “Trigger finger on the Saints game” means as soon as that game resumes, they’re showing it live.

“The witching hour”: The half-hour blitz that typically occurs at the end of the early window. “Where losses become wins,” Hanson declares, “and where wins become losses.”

10:52 a.m.: It’s stunning how smooth the operation is with eight games going at once. Hanson will be mid-conversation with Guilanians, then live a moment later, speaking to millions of people about a play he hasn’t even seen. That’s where the prep comes in — he’ll call the names of hundreds of players, needing help on a pronunciation just once all day.

Hanson spent his first two years at NFL Network as a roving reporter, bouncing from city to city on the weekends to cover games. He’d be the guy in the press box in Foxboro, there for Patriots-Dolphins, refreshing his phone for updates on every game across the league. “Did you know Adrian Peterson has 100 yards at the half?” he’d bug the reporter next to him. “Oh! Romo hit T.O. for another touchdown!”

He had an early hunch RedZone would work, and he knew if they did it right, it would forever change the way fans watch football. The minute he heard NFL Network was starting its own version, Hanson knew: He was perfect for it.

“Is it true?” he texted Jamie Hemann, then the talent coordinator at the network. “If so, I want it.”

It wasn’t handed to him. Instead of a typical 15-minute interview, Hanson’s RedZone audition dragged on for five grueling hours, leaving his suit soaked in sweat. They had him call eight games simultaneously, hoping to test his stamina as much as his poise.

“Gave it everything I had,” he remembers. “And I left there thinking I’d either nailed it and was going to get the job, or I’d set my career back considerably at NFL Network.”

He got the call two months later, sitting in a Marriott in San Antonio while covering the dog days of Dallas Cowboys training camp. His life was about to change.

“Scott, I knew within the first 10 minutes of the audition that you were the guy,” Eric Weinberger, then the executive producer of NFL Media, told him.

“That’s great,” Hanson said. “But why’d you keep me there for five hours then?”

11:07 a.m.: He sits down for the first time.

11:14 a.m.: He’s back out of his seat.

11:31 a.m.: Sometimes, you prep all week and have a stat ready to go that never gets used. This is not one of those Sundays.

The Jaguars’ Josh Allen has just sacked the Bills’ Josh Allen. It’s the first time in NFL history that two players with identical names have been involved in such a play. Hanson’s had the nugget ready to go for days, hoping he’d get to use it on the air.

“Watch this,” he says before going live.

11:41 a.m.: “Replays! Give me some replays!”

Hanson is shouting at Nettles, wanting more looks at the Cowboys-Broncos game. Confusion reigns. Dallas is down 16-0 at home but just blocked a punt, and the Cowboys believe it should be their ball. Problem is: the return was muffed, and the Broncos recovered a live ball.

Hanson knows he needs to clear it all up so his audience isn’t left in the dark.

“Just show it, just show it,” he says. “I can explain it.”

12:05 p.m.: “Has Tom Brady tweeted at us yet?” Hanson asks the control room.

He knows the Bucs QB is on a bye this week. He’s hoping he’s watching his favorite show from the couch.

Does he get nervous before airtime? “I haven’t been nervous in years,” Hanson says. (Courtesy of NFL Media)

12:17 p.m.: More Josh Allen-on-Josh Allen crime. The Jags’ linebacker has just intercepted the Bills’ QB, and Hanson is as fired up as he’s been all day.

“What, is NFL Films directing this game?” he wonders aloud.

12:23 p.m.: Most of the early games are stunners. The Broncos beat the Cowboys, the Giants beat the Raiders and the Jags finish off the Bills. “The upset of the year,” Hanson calls the Jacksonville victory.

“To everyone in Duval County, please celebrate responsibly,” he adds with a sly smile, a subtle nod at Urban Meyer’s extracurricular activities in recent weeks.

1:18 p.m.: “Look up 98-yard drives that end in zero points,” he tells Larrivee.

Over three hours in, and Hanson’s still bobbing back and forth, this Energizer bunny that never runs out of steam. He’s got Adidas sneakers on beneath his suit jacket. He cuts a classic TV figure: square jaw, teeth whiter than white, voice booming like it was engineered in a factory with the label “sportscaster.”

His first job in the business? He was the weekend sports guy for a tiny station in Traverse City, Mich. He made $15,000 a year. After another stop in Springfield, Ill., he actually left the industry, pouring himself into another passion of his: ministry. Hanson spent a year working full-time for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, running a homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. Among his areas of outreach: helping runaway teenagers that were targets of the L.A. gang scene.

“Might be the only person on the planet who can say they’ve had Mother Teresa and Roger Goodell for bosses,” he says.

By 1997, he’d found his way back into local TV, and after stops in Tampa Bay, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., NFL Network called.

A devout Christian, missionary work remains a core tenet of who Hanson is. He typically uses his vacation time to pair a week of volunteering with a week of thrill-seeking. He’s served all over the globe — Kenya, Haiti, Peru, Serbia, the Philippines. For his 40th birthday, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona. He flew inside a Russian fighter jet. He swam with sharks off the coasts of Australia and Mexico.

“From me to you was the nose of a great white shark,” he says. “You’re nervous the first time, but after that, you actually get comfortable with them.”

We’ll take his word for it.

1:23 p.m.: With live TV, there are always screw-ups. I ask Hanson about the ones he wants back.

One year, after Drew Brees left a Saints game with an injury, Hanson heard someone in the control room yell “RIBS!” He went with it.

“We’re hearing that Saints quarterback Drew Brees is dealing with a rib injury,” he told his audience.

Problem was, it was a Browns fan yelling “CRIBBS!” after a lengthy kickoff return from Josh Cribbs.

“Oops,” Hanson says now, shaking his head.

“But thankfully, I’ve never conflated the Washington Football Team with their former nickname. I have not called the Las Vegas Raiders their previous name. But I know I’ve messed up the Los Angeles Chargers.”

1:50 p.m.: With the Titans in town to face the Rams at neighboring SoFi Stadium, a group of Tennessee execs is touring NFL Network’s new offices. They’ve asked to see the RedZone studio, which isn’t uncommon — the Browns’ Jimmy Haslem and the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones have stopped by already this season. Everyone — even billionaire owners — want to see Hanson in action.

“This is the best show on TV,” one Titans employee tells him.

Hanson is talking to a Titans exec one minute, walking him through how he does his job, and then he’s doing it, holding up a finger, listening to Nettles in his ear, then moving through a highlight with ease.

After they shuffle out a few minutes later, Hanson shrugs.

“They asked me to fill in at running back now that Derrick Henry is out,” he jokes.

“I told them I was retired.”

He was an all-conference player in high school, good enough to walk-on at Syracuse as a long snapper. Over four seasons, Hanson filled in at every position in practice save quarterback, often lining up at corner and doing his best to not let a speedy young receiver named Marvin Harrison embarrass him too badly. In reality, he took a beating most days. “I was a scrub, don’t get it twisted,” Hanson says. “I was Rudy without the glorified sack in my last game.”

But the Orange won the Fiesta Bowl and finished sixth in the country his senior year. He’s still proud of that. He was never a star, but the game gave him something. It’s had a pull on him ever since.

1:54 p.m.: He sits down for the second time.

2:10 p.m.: He’s back out of his seat.

2:31 p.m.: Not only does Hanson avoid the restroom for all seven hours, but he doesn’t eat. He doesn’t even take a sip of water. At one point, an assistant replaces the batteries in his microphone.

“My battery is rechargeable with good football,” he says.

He’ll be on the elliptical at the gym in April or May, fighting his way through the last few minutes of a workout, when an NFL Sunday will pop into his mind. “Gotta push through,” he’ll tell himself. “This is just like the last hour of RedZone.”

2:48 p.m.: Finally, I give in.

I use the restroom. I find my way to the cafeteria. I pour a coffee. I munch on a Kind bar. I’m weak.

I have no idea how he does it.

3:14 p.m.: “By the way,” Hanson asks the control room, “has Tom Brady tweeted at us yet?”

3:31 p.m.: He sits down for a third time.

3:36 p.m.: During a lull in the late window — there are only three games going — Hanson actually yawns. It’s his first and only of the day.

“I’m embarrassed,” he says.

Scott Hanson interacts with fans during the 2021 NFL Draft in Cleveland. The veteran broadcaster had stops in Tampa Bay, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., prior to his time at NFL Network. (Ben Liebenberg / Associated Press)

3:41 p.m.: He’s back out of his seat.

4:32 p.m.: That’s a wrap. Hanson is humming DMX while he slips off his microphone. Episode 213 is in the books.

“Great job Brian, great job Allan, great job everyone!” he shouts.

The final tallies:

Games called: 11.

Touchdowns called: 48.

Bathroom breaks: Zero.

Water sips: Zero.

Pronunciation mistakes: one, on a special teams play.

Makeup retouches: three.

“Ums”: eight, a figure Hanson later disputes.

Time in his chair: 33 minutes.

Time out of his chair: 327 minutes.

Tom Brady shoutouts: Zero.

6:13 p.m.: A football junkie’s football junkie, Hanson drives home, orders takeout and flips on Rams-Titans, the final game of the day. By the second quarter, he’ll be into a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby.

That’s when the text comes. “It’s time for the bathroom,” he writes, which means after eight long hours — from the start of the early games through the first half of Sunday Night Football — he’s finally giving in.

“The surgeon said it’s fine. Haha.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photos: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press)

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