New overlay: the ESPN 2018 scorebug for football

The nice people over at r/Scorebug recently posted about ESPN's 2018-2020 scorebugs, and it gave us a nice sense of nostalgia.

Say hello to ESPN 2018, a new overlay style for American football and flag football. Here it is running in a real game, the moment the home side punches one in:

Click to enlarge

A corner bug, in your team's colours

Most of our football overlays sit centred along the bottom of the frame. This one is different. It tucks into the bottom-right corner, the way a broadcast graphic does, and leaves the rest of the screen clear for the play. Be aware that this might not be optimal for mobile screens (it's a bit smaller than our other bugs), and it makes the sharing of vertical videos on social media a bit cumbersome, but we decided we wanted it for the nostalgia.

Each team's side is filled with that team's colour, pulled straight from your team setup. Set one side to crimson and the other to black and the bug reads exactly like the Saturday broadcast. The score sits large and italic, with the team name in a condensed cap above it. It's a dense, confident little bar, and it reads at a glance even at streaming bitrates.

For a grassroots club, that colour fill matters more than it might sound. Your team has colours. Your kit has colours. When the scorebug wears them too, the whole stream starts to feel like it belongs to your club rather than to a generic template. That's the difference between a stream that looks thrown together and one a parent is happy to share. And none of it needs a designer. You pick two colours in the control panel and the bar builds itself around them.

The info block: clock, down and distance, quarter

On the right sits the information block. Clock on top, down and distance in the white bar in the middle, and the quarter centred underneath.

We deliberately left the play clock out. On a live grassroots broadcast it's one more thing to babysit, and getting a 40-second countdown wrong on screen looks worse than not showing it at all. The quarter reads cleaner on its own, and it's one less field for whoever's running the scoreboard to worry about between snaps.

The block is a light, slightly translucent grey rather than solid black, so a hint of the field shows through behind it. It's a small thing, but it's what makes a graphic feel like it's part of the broadcast rather than pasted on top of it.

The block adapts to the sport too. On an American football scoreboard you get the full down and distance, "2nd & 6". On a flag football scoreboard, where there's no distance to gain, it shows just the down. Same overlay, correct behaviour for each game, nothing to configure.

Accent colours, on every football overlay

Look closely at a real broadcast bug and the timeout markers aren't plain white. They're the team's secondary colour. One side's are red, the other's are gold.

So we added an accent colour to each team's setup, and it drives the timeout markers. Set it once and the little pips next to each team pick it up.

We didn't keep this to the new style. It now works across every football overlay we ship: Classic, Compact, Fox, CBS, and ESPN 2018. Leave the accent on its default white and nothing changes, so none of your existing scoreboards look any different. Set a colour and the timeouts wear it everywhere. It's the kind of detail nobody asks for by name, but it's the reason a bug reads as "that team" and not "some team".

The touchdown moment

Scoring should feel like something. When you hit the TD button, the bug transforms. The other team slides away, the scoring team's panel takes over the full bar, their logo and name front and centre, and the score rolls up by six while a TOUCHDOWN banner wipes across. Then it settles back to the normal bug and play carries on.

The best part is there's nothing new to learn. Just like our other scoring animations, it fires off the touchdown preset you already use to add points. Score the touchdown the way you always do, and the celebration plays itself. No second button, no timing to get right in the moment, no clip to trigger. You're watching the game, not operating a graphics desk.

And because the scoreboard runs on a live connection, it doesn't matter where you control it from. Tap the touchdown on your phone from the sideline and the celebration plays on the stream instantly, with no refresh and no second device to babysit. Whoever's behind the camera doesn't have to touch a thing.

Getting the logo right

ESPN-style bugs show the logo large, in a wide slot on the team's side of the bar. For it to look its best, upload a landscape logo, wider than it is tall.

The overlay fills that slot and centre-crops the image to fit. A tall crest, or a logo with a lot of empty space around it, will get cropped in ways you might not want. When you switch to this style, there's a reminder right in the team setup telling you what shape to aim for.

Who it's for

Anyone streaming football who wants it to look like the broadcast. The clip above is from a real game played by the Oslo Vikings, a Norwegian American football club, using ScoreLayer to run their scoreboard. That's the point of it: a corner bug that wouldn't look out of place on television, run from a phone or a laptop on the sideline by a volunteer.

It fits college-style American football streams, club and youth games, and flag football nights where the vibe matters as much as the final score. If you're setting up your stream for the first time, the OBS setup guide walks through getting any ScoreLayer overlay on screen, and this style drops in the same way.

ESPN 2018 is available now on any American football or flag football scoreboard on a paid plan. Switch to it under overlay style in your control panel, set your team colours and accent colours, and drop in a landscape logo. Then go score a touchdown and watch it light up.