All that sensory overload hardly compares to what’s on Robinow’s MacBook Air. He’ll have, by his estimation, 100 windows and tabs active on his laptop screen, many of them open to various queries and reports within Sportradar’s analytics tool, Radar360. Others hold quarterback and team game logs, the NFL record book, each team’s postseason records and a myriad more. He’s become adept at using the four-finger upward swipe to access Mission Control, a thumbnail view of his crowded desktop real estate.

“Basically any Super Bowl record you can possibly think of” is within his reach, Robinow said. “It’s just a matter of finding it.”

Much of the legwork was done in the week prior to the game, when Robinow and Sportradar’s larger research team are building game notes, but sometimes the on-field action requires statistical context. At times, Robinow will cue his seat mate, Fox Sports broadcast associate Casey Garland, to build a visual. Other times, he’ll punch a button to speak to an in-booth spotter, who might share the tidbit with commentators Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen.

Robinow joined Sportradar from STATS LLC in 2018, the first year Fox Sports commissioned Sportradar to provide statistical support for their coverage. He has been working with the A broadcast team ever since: Joe Buck and Troy Aikman until its fall, now Burkhardt and Olsen and, quite possibly, a duo featuring Tom Brady by 2024.

An economics graduate from USC who later worked in asset management, Robinow is by all accounts a stathead, as one would expect given his current gig, but he attempts to strike a balance for TV coverage, particularly in the postseason when more casual fans tune in.

“The deeper into the playoffs you get, the more eyeballs you get, the more a stat needs to be concise and really tell a story at a glance,” he said.

While some of the stats he sends might be mundane, others are more eye-popping. A particular coup came in NFL Week 10 when the Dallas Cowboys led the Green Bay Packers 28-14 after three quarters. But the fourth quarter began with the Packers driving into Dallas territory, and Robinow entered a query into Radar360 and discovered a startling figure: in Cowboys franchise history, they were 195-0 when leading by at least 14 points entering the fourth quarter.

That stat was turned into a lower-third chyron and proved prescient: the Packers tied the game in the fourth quarter and won in overtime for the first such comeback against Dallas.

“That made for a nice in-game graphic,” Robinow said. “I just had to use some instincts and anticipation to find that nugget and find what was the best way to present it.”

“It was a remarkable note that got a lot of attention that day,” Garland wrote in an email, adding that “Zach and Sportradar have a direct impact on the broadcast” each week, both through pregame preparation and on-the-fly storytelling.

That kind of success seems like a lightning-in-a-bottle situation, but it was actually the second such strike that day.

Robinow only travels for postseason games, when the additional time spent in production meetings can help him better understand the narratives the broadcast team might pursue. During the regular season, he’s stationed at home in Los Angeles with a specially-equipped television that eliminates the typical broadcast latency. He has his computer and two other monitors, so he can spread his work out across three screens. He’ll still be tuned in live to the A broadcast and able to communicate via a headset, but for other games, he’ll watch the Red Zone channel and send Slack messages to channels dedicated for each production crew.

A Minneapolis native, Robinow watched with interest as his hometown Vikings fell behind the Bills 24-10 at the half but started mounting a rally.

“I sent a nugget to that production via Slack and said, ‘I'm trying to speak this jinx into existence, but the Bills have won 52 in a row when leading by at least 14 at half at home. They haven't lost since 1968,’” he said, helping produce another graphic foreshadowing a dramatic win.

Robinow’s top priority is 100% accuracy, but he also learns to cater his notes to the preferences of each broadcaster. Olsen, in particular, is a savvy analyst who is interested in hearing the numbers if he doesn’t communicate them to the viewing audience.

“I'll listen to things he says, go deeper on what he's saying, seeing if I can find statistical trends and facts to support those insights," Robinow said. “And that might not make a graphic, but he might touch on it verbally. It helps back up what he's saying. He can allude to ‘they're the best at this,’ and there is a factual measure of that.”

Many datapoints that Robinow shares fail to make the Fox broadcast. That’s just the nature of the job: there’s only so much time and bandwidth. Sometimes there’ll be notes about streaks, such as a kicker making 45 straight field goals of a certain distance, that won’t make it to air. But Robinow suspects that has something to do with backlash against commentators from superstition-believing fans.

“They should give me a shoutout next time,” Robinow said with a laugh. “It’s the Sportradar jinx, not the announcer jinx.”