Elias Sports Bureau Does More Than Crunch Numbers for Monday Night Football

A look inside Monday Night Football.

In one corner of the ESPN Monday Night Football production truck sits Steve Hirdt, executive vice-president of the Elias Sports Bureau. He is, on Monday nights, a very busy man.

If there's a number spoken by one of the announcers or flashed on the screen during a game, Hirdt, more likely than not, came up with it. For 26 years, he has worked on the Monday Night Football broadcasts, first on ABC and then on ESPN.

During tonight's game, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was a frequent topic of conversation among the announcers, and Hirdt, sitting in the production truck, was looking for statistical angles to use in discussing Peterson. He'd look something up on his computer or within the reams of paper sitting on his desk, then turn to an ESPN producer and say something like, "Do you want something on Peterson's 296-yard game? Mike [Tirico] might talk about that."

Hirdt told me that he's not a statistician by training – he was a journalism major in college, and that's what got him prepared for the job. Hirdt's job is really not much different than Ron Jaworski's: Hirdt uses stats and Jaworski uses film study, but they're both analyzing the game.