All or Nothing: A Season with the Arizona Cardinals

I served as location audio recordist on All or Nothing: A Season with the Arizona Cardinals, Amazon Prime Video’s all-access documentary mini-series following the Cardinals through their 2015 NFL season. The series premiered on Amazon on July 1, 2016 and launched what became a multi-season franchise covering teams across the NFL and beyond.

The 2015 Cardinals finished 13-3 — one of the best regular-season records in franchise history — under head coach Bruce Arians, with Carson Palmer at quarterback and Larry Fitzgerald, Patrick Peterson, David Johnson, and Calais Campbell featured throughout. The access went deep: locker room, sidelines, film sessions, and the kind of coaching conversations that almost never reach a camera.

For me this was a hometown production — the Cardinals are an Arizona team and I’m based in Phoenix — which added a layer of investment beyond the professional. Working a live NFL season with a production this ambitious means solving for audio in some genuinely challenging environments: crowd noise at the stadium, the hard-surface acoustics of a concrete locker room, tight sideline windows during games where you’re working around dozens of people. Getting a clean, consistent track out of all of that is the job.

The series set the template for what Amazon’s sports documentary franchise became. Looking at it now, the 13-3 season and the depth of access the production team secured hold up well.