February 17, 2025

Hello from the mountains!

I’m out west for a few days this week skiing with my kids. This is going to sound weird, but I have never been this excited about the end of a season, though probably not for the reasons you think.

For the first time since I came into the league, I didn’t wake up the morning after the Super Bowl with aches and pains or surgery appointments. I wasn’t hungover from a win or in denial about a loss. And unlike the last handful of years, I didn’t wake up with anxiety, wondering if I was making the right decision about the year ahead. Do I stay, do I go? Do I play, do I not? Do I take a break, do I jump right into the booth?

This past Monday, I woke up bright-eyed and clear-headed. The sun was shining. The grass was green. The water was blue. Whatever kind of birds live in South Florida were chirping. And I was ready to start my off-season process of reflecting on key areas of my life—my physical health, my mental and emotional health, my relationships, my business interests, and my work.

I call this period my “self scout” and I treat it like an extended bye week where my team and I look back at my performance in all those key areas over the previous year and we identify opportunities for improvement in the coming year. Back when I was playing, the focus often oriented around a mix of rehab and mobility, mechanics and decision-making, supplements, sleep schedule adjustments, and mental exercises. And we were always working on dialing in how I prepared. Whatever the case, once we had our heads wrapped around the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, then we’d break out my calendar and work on the ‘how’ and the ‘when’, plotting out a draft of everything I’m going to do for the next six to seven months.

One of the keys to this exercise is going day by day and, for me, using a physical calendar. The process of looking back, reflecting on what I’ve learned over the past year, recognizing patterns and applying those insights to the year ahead has been an indispensable anchor for me over the years. The process of making that plan and holding it in my hands grounds me in the day-to-day reality of my life, forcing me to consciously prioritize the things I care most about and be hyper-intentional about where I’ll be, who I’m going to be with, how I’ll spend my time and why. Ultimately, the idea is to reduce the distance between my intentions and my actions, and to tie my larger goals and where I want to put my energy to a daily process. It’s a living breathing document made in pencil, not ink, but I’ve got a plan for every day laid out on the table in front of me.

Sometimes the “day by day” blocks I’m looking at are workouts or travel or business interests, which should have some degree of flexibility, but there are also the things that don’t show up on the calendar that you create space for no matter what. People. Business partners, mentors, friends, loved ones. Family. If I’m flipping through the months of February and March and I feel like I’ve tipped the scales too much towards work and travel, that’s a full stop and reset. Changes need to be made. In my experience, it’s much harder to catch things like this when you’re staring at your Google calendar on your iPad. A physical calendar—especially a big day planner like I use—makes those days and weeks more tangible, more real. As you flip page after page, you can literally feel between your fingers how much time you are committing to what you care about most—day by day.

We’re a full week into the self scout as I write this, and it’s clear that I have a lot of work ahead of me this spring and summer. I’m not worried. I’m here for it. I love the work. And the fact that I’ve been able to transition seamlessly into it from the season has been a unique blessing, because in my former life, the end of the football season was always very hard.

Obviously, there was the physical, mental and emotional stuff to deal with like I mentioned, but there was also the fact that the season just sort of stops. There’s no ramp down. For five months it’s go, go, go, and then…nothing. You’re just done. It’s like running on a treadmill set to 11 miles per hour and then someone smashes the shutdown button: it’s almost impossible not to lose your balance and fall on your face. And it’s not like that treadmill shunts you off the back onto some soft cloud where you can rest all cozy like a Care Bear. It propels you onto another treadmill entirely. This one’s called “regular life” and it’s been running in parallel the whole time, at a different pace you’re only vaguely familiar with because you’ve been focused on running at 11 miles per hour since August. Good luck getting onto your feet and getting moving on that one without some serious help.

Help is exactly what you need in situations like this. Coming out the other end of a hard experience, or finishing up your first year in a new job or a new school, you need people to help you get your legs underneath you so you can hit the moving ground running. You need them to assist in your self scout, to identify the things that live in your blind spot, and to hold you accountable for the things you put on your calendar in the pursuit of getting better every day.

I’m fortunate that I have a whole team I’ve been working with for the last 10, 15, 20 years. We all have the same mindset around improvement and are motivated by the same set of goals. Who in your life could that be for you? Who do you think might be willing to jump in the boat with you and start rowing in the same direction? Whoever they are, however many of them there are, do your future self a favor and give them a call this week.

LFG.

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Richie Zyontz is a legend in this business.

He’s been producing NFL games for over four decades, with 23 seasons as FOX’s lead producer and eight Super Bowls under his belt.

There’s no one better to give you an inside look at what it takes to put together a broadcast at the highest level. In this blog, he shares behind-the-scenes stories from our FOX crew as we navigated the season all the way up to New Orleans.

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