  Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building
team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior
studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics
evince commentator bias in sports broadcasts. To examine this phenomenon, we
assemble FOOTBALL, which contains 1,455 broadcast transcripts from American
football games across six decades that are automatically annotated with 250K
player mentions and linked with racial metadata. We identify major confounding
factors for researchers examining racial bias in FOOTBALL, and perform a
computational analysis that supports conclusions from prior social science
studies.
