How This Whole Thing Works
A layman's explanation. Mostly accurate. No robots were harmed, though several were mildly scolded.
The headline river
Every few hours, a script opens up eight or so Commanders websites and asks one question of every headline: "does this mention the Commanders." If it's actually about the Lions and the Commanders got mentioned in passing, it's out. It is not a journalist. It just really, really likes making lists.
The ticker
That scrolling strip near the top is this site eavesdropping on beat reporters' social media, through a side door, because the front door started charging rent. It refreshes every couple hours, and every 15 minutes during a game.
The Blog (weekly editions)
Once a week, an AI model that lives on this computer reads everything that happened and writes a proper column, quotes and all. It doesn't get to publish itself — a human reads the draft and has to click "approve" first, after an early test model once confidently invented a player who never put on a Commanders helmet.
The Blog (game previews)
The day before a game, the same local AI writes a preview from the matchup itself, the current betting line, and whatever's been reported that week, no result implied since there isn't one yet. Same rule as the weekly edition: a human has to approve it before it publishes.
The Blog (game days, new and slightly reckless)
During an actual game there's no time for a human between quarters, so this part runs unsupervised. Every 15 minutes a faster, cloud-based AI checks the score and, if a quarter just ended, writes a recap from the real play-by-play plus what fans and reporters are posting live. Its one leash: it can only call a play "amazing" if a real person already said so first, with their name attached.
The betting line
The spread and over/under next to the schedule come from a real sportsbook, by way of ESPN's own public data. Not a tip, a lock, or financial advice.
Podcasts and the schedule
The schedule is scraped from the team's own site. The podcasts are just real Spotify players, doing what Spotify players do.
The Roster page
Every player, photo included, sorted by something commanders.com's own roster page won't tell you: who this site's own coverage is actually talking about this week, backed by real ESPN season stats next to each name. The other 70-ish quiet players are still in there, just filed under a button. A "Depth Chart" tab up top pulls the team's own official depth chart straight from their site, position by position.
The Videos page (phones only)
On a phone, the video rail moves off the main page and gets its own "Videos" tab, since scrolling past six press conferences to reach the schedule wasn't the point. On a bigger screen the rail just sits beside everything else, and the tab doesn't bother existing.
The plumbing nobody asked about
None of this lives on a server anyone has to babysit. A robot on GitHub's own computers wakes up every few hours, does the collecting and writing, and hands the result to Netlify to serve. If it oversleeps, the site just keeps showing whatever it built last time.
Why "The Burgundy Wire"?
Burgundy, because that's aggressively the team's color. Wire, because a "news wire" is the old-timey term for exactly what this is. "The Burgundy RSS Feed" tested poorly with a focus group of one person.
The fine print, but funnier
This is a hobby project built by one person and several well-behaved scripts, not a newsroom. If something here is wrong, it's almost certainly the robots' fault, and they have already been informed of this in writing.