Ran NFL (their own spelling: ran NFL) is the German show that carries two regular season games of the National Football League every sunday (Jeden Verdammten Sonntag as their slogan goes) as well as all playoff games, all London games and most Thanksgiving games. They even show the Pro Bowl. While they are usually in London for London games and have a team on site for the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl, the bulk of their coverage is produced from a studio near Munich with one commentator and one expert sitting at a table and "netman" Christoph "Icke" Dommisch assisting them with a Latop at another table. They are those German guys the NFL likes to upload videos of on their social media pages. Most of the people involved were fairly unknown prior to their stint at ran NFL, but Frank "Buschi" Buschmannnote was a household name for his involvement with many, many sports, particularly soccer and basketball and Jan Stecker was known to some for his appearance on several auto shows after his stint as the QB of the German national American Football team. The unique approach to sports coverage is credited with the rising popularity of American Football in Germany and due to the extensive involvement of social media in the show (critics say Icke's only job is to "read tweets") it has become something of a pop cultural phenomenon with several newspapers reporting on the show and how it transformed the "Nischensportart" (roughly a sport with only niche interest) into a trend affecting large parts of society.
The regular season games are shown on Pro7 Maxx which belongs to the Pro7Sat1 conglomerate, one of the two big private TV stations in Germany. Playoff games are sometimes shown on the main Sat1 channel as is the Super Bowl. All games are invariably available via web stream, though this is reportedly geoblocked to only be accessible from Germany. Starting with the 2017 season another daily game (in the 1pm Eastern time / 19:00 German time slot) is also shown via Livestream in parallel to the TV game.
In 2021 Patrick Esume, a former player and coach whose current fame is largely due to his involvement with Ran NFL, launched a new semi-pro pan-European league of American Football called creatively the "European League of Football". Given the pre-existing contacts between the people responsible for the league and the Pro7/Sat1 Media Conglomerate, they also got a pretty sweet TV deal with usually at least two games every weekend broadcast live under the "ran" brand.
This program contains examples of:
- Ascended Fanboy: Stecker and Motzkus used to play themselves (the former as Quarterback and Tight End, the latter as Wide Receiver) and Florian Schmidt-Sommerfeld was found through a casting call.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Icke has a wild mane of hair, a beard and speaks in an audible Berlin/Brandenburg dialect (hence his nickname; "Icke" is Berlin-German for "ich" or "I")
- Comedic Sociopathy: Jan Stecker has a propensity to threaten violence whenever someone dare question the greatness of his two favorite Quarterbacks, Joe Montana and Peyton Manning
- Game of Nerds: True, this isn't Baseball, but the way Roman Motzkus approaches the game has shades of this. He just loves stats, including such obscure ones like the win percentage of the Dallas Cowboys depending on the roof and door of their home stadium being open or closed. That despite - or because of - the fact that Motzkus himself had a quite storied career as a Bundesliga Wide Receiver for the Berlin Adler
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Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The fact that a foreign sports league with incidental contributions by Germans - at best - took off in Germany. Similarly the reaction of many Americans upon hearing the commentary compared to e.g. Buck/Aikmann - Large Ham: Almost all commentators and experts to some degree, but Buschmann is most notorious for hamming it up even though Esume is also prone to that, and the latter likes to interlace his hamminess with outbursts like "Das is' jetzt nich' wirklich passiert" (that didn't really just happen)
- Like an Old Married Couple: Buschmann and Icke liked to mock-fight on the show but also swear that they actually liked each other and hung out outside of work. Given that Buschmann suggested Icke take an on-camera role, this may well be true.
- Noodle Incident: When Stecker, Esume or Motzkus refer to their own playing or coaching days, it may come off as this. Especially when it is a cryptic allusion to something that happened in the Eighties (and was definitely not on TV) and all we get is something like "Yeah, I can attest to how important it is to properly catch the ball, as one lost German Bowl can attest"
