What's possible for your spotting charts will blow your mind
You can't unsee what I'm about to show you, and it's incredible
Everyone’s play-by-play preparation process is different. In many respects, there’s no wrong way to prepare, as long as you’re doing it. But you need to prepare, and one preparation tactic that’s become nearly universal is the making of a spotting board or a scorecard, depending on the sport. A spotting board (or spotter chart) is a way of organizing basic biographical data and talking points about a player or a team so it can be quickly accessed and seamlessly integrated into your live call. Here’s an example of a standard spotting board for football I found floating around on the internet.
Not bad. The problem with spotting boards, however, is they can be pretty labor intensive if you do them yourself, and pretty expensive if you hire a service. Going at it alone means valuable hours sunk looking up and typing mandatory minutiae, most of which you won’t actually use and definitely won’t make your call significantly better. Meanwhile, using a service, aside from expense, left me frustrated and unsatisfied with delivery times, and a lack of flexibility, creativity and customization.
Somewhere over the last five years, I started obsessively diving into Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets (and more recently, AI), and became pretty excited when I realized that the actual best charts in the world for me are the ones I can make myself, using modern tools to automate the information I want and need. The amount of detail and the accuracy started going way up, while the time I was wasting typing heights, weights, hometowns, high schools and stats was going down. Better info was one thing. Better info and less time spent was a double-whammy, giving me more time to watch game tape, attend practice, get pronunciations perfected, have conversations with coaches and players, and spend valuable in-season time with my family.
Fast forward to 2024, and our thrilling Sugar Bowl win over Texas, which sent us to the national championship game. From the moment we wrapped up in New Orleans, I was on the clock, less than seven days away from calling the biggest game of my life. That week, I didn’t have to stress about spending hours slaving away typing tidbits of information. I simply spent 30 seconds doing what you’ll see in the video below:
Trust me when I say that was not the extent of my preparation. Creating my boards this quickly didn’t allow me to work ten fewer hours. It gave me a ten-hour head start. But the advantage it gave me knowing I already had all that information locked and loaded, laid out the exact way that I wanted, so I could simply hit print and begin reading, writing, conversing, visualizing, reviewing tape and scratching all the other notes I needed down… it’s indescribable how much that changed the game for me.
Not only were my boards ready to be printed and studied, but they were way more thorough than if I had to type all the information myself. When you find great sources of data to scrape off the internet, you can automate processes to deliver those hard-to-find nuggets that you love every week, even if they aren’t in the game notes.
Take a look at the screen grab above. I was able to use a filter to put every non-QB offensive player in numerical order on the left side of the chart, so if someone snuck into the game on special teams or for a single offensive snap who wasn’t on the two deep, I’d be ready. I didn’t just have stats for Michael Penix, Jr., but a complete situational breakdown. Offensive linemen were highlighted with games played, games started and penalties committed. I had three years worth of team stats available, with national rankings, to be able to decipher trends and a broader storyline about how far the offense had come under the second-year coach and offensive coordinator. I had a complete, situational breakdown of Red Zone, 3rd and 4th down efficiency, their play-calling trends on 1st & 10, where they ranked nationally in explosive rushing and passing plays, and the length of the longest plays of the season, in case those marks might be topped. Below the fold, a complete schedule, with final score, turnover margin, team rushing, team passing, total offense and yards per play, all color coded to signify season highs and lows.
All that with a simple dropdown menu. Had we played against Alabama instead of Michigan, I would’ve simply changed which team I had selected. All of that harvested from publicly available data on the internet, none of which is behind a paywall.
That’s what’s possible with Google Sheets alone.
Add in some of Excel’s strengths, and juice it with the steroids of A.I., and you get… my basketball boards.
Within 60 seconds, I use my KenPom subscription and a simple copy/paste job off stats.ncaa.org to lay out absolutely everything I could want to know, data wise, going into a basketball game. Here’s how quickly I could crank out a board on the Arizona Wildcats:
After printing out a quick two-sided flip card, my eyes can quickly jump from program history data, to the fact that the Wildcats went 0-4 in one possession games, to Caleb Love’s love of the three ball, ranking 21st nationally in 3-point attempts on the season.
I have literally charged $1,000 to professional broadcasters to build templates like these for them. But I realized that what I’d instead prefer to do is take the half decade of tutorials, Google searches, YouTube videos, trial and error, and AI requests… and empower you to do it yourself by showing you exactly how to do it, taking out all the guess work, eliminating all the rabbit holes, and simply showing you the way.
I’m not going to lie, it’s an offseason project to build the board of your dreams, and it takes time and practice. But you can start automating data, literally any data set, whether it’s scraped off NFL.com or off an Excel spreadsheet from a volunteer statistician at the high school you cover.
My approach will be to build a board from scratch with you, using videos you can watch over and over, to show you exactly how this is done. We will build together from the ground up, and as you learn the functions and how to utilize AI to your advantage, you can start applying that knowledge to make your board precisely the way you want them to look.
I consider this the second best value this website offers. Given that I’ve charged $1,000 to build one of these in the past, I considered charging $20-25 per month just for access to this alone. But, as I reconsidered, I realized I’d rather help as many people as possible learn these skills, which will not just help you prep for play-by-play broadcasts, but will make you better at tracking your personal finances, better at tracking the calories you consume, better at organizing your life, better at anything that Excel or Google Sheets helps people do.
I can now create spotting boards so easily that I can print boards out just to watch a game on my couch for fun. If learning these skills can make you a better and more productive broadcaster, or human being, click the subscribe button and let’s start nerding out with a new lesson every Sunday night for Spreadsheet Sundays.
Spotting Board testimonials
“Tony is an excellent broadcaster and an excellent resource. His ability to imagine, visualize, execute and teach is a superpower. Thanks to Tony my preparation has gotten more efficient than I could have imagined. He not only understands what a broadcaster needs but what makes a great broadcast, and I consider myself lucky that he has shared with me what he has discovered.”
- Guy Haberman, Big Ten Network
“Last season was the most streamlined of my career thanks to Tony's understanding of our craft and how to create and optimize automated spotting boards. His innovative, customized templates enabled me to recoup bandwidth (which had personal and professional benefits) and directly correlated to more efficient preparation and accurate finished products.”
- J.B. Long, voice of the Los Angeles Rams & Pac-12 Networks