Why did Fox Sports remove its out-of-town scores ticker from NFL broadcasts?

Given the way live sports are consumed in 2024, the idea of informing viewers about scoring changes in out-of-town games as they happen seems antiquated.

If you're listening to a game on the radio while driving your car and don't want to fiddle with your phone, fine. Periodic out-of-town score updates are useful. For the rest of us, we've been using secondary devices to monitor scoring changes in real time while watching television for years.

The multi-device experience is useful for a variety of functions, of course: messaging with friends who are watching the same game, monitoring your fantasy team, in-game wagering (responsibly, of course), all while monitoring the main event on your television. This isn't a new idea; it's the way sports have been consumed for years.

It's a small wonder, then, whenever network executives still insist on devoting on-screen real estate to out-of-town tickers.

The folks in the Fox Sports boardroom in charge of on-screen graphics recently cottoned to this reality. In his most recent reader mailbag column for The Athletic, Richard Deitsch reached out to Fox in response to an observation that its out-of-town score ticker had finally disappeared from its NFL broadcasts.

"Good eye by the reader," a Fox Sports spokesperson told Deitsch. "And that reader also answered his own question. It’s for a cleaner look and makes the game feel bigger. It’ll stay this way for the foreseeable future.”

For anyone who had already noticed the change, this isn't news; even if you hadn't, this story amounts to a long overdue case of "nothing to see here."