The FOX Sports mascot reached young adulthood during the 2025 NFL season, marking two decades of the animated robot dominating the network's NFL broadcasts every Sunday. What began as a desperate creative gamble has cemented itself as one of sports television's most recognizable assets.

The path to Cleatus wasn't straightforward. FOX Sports executive vice president and creative director Gary Hartley faced a fundamental problem: animation packages for sports broadcasts were interchangeable and forgettable.

"Animation packages for sports are flipping logos. Everything we came up with, I felt like we had seen before," Hartley said.

A Child's Sketch Becomes a Mascot

Hartley's breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a drawing his son Andrew created when he was 8 or 9 years old. Digging through old files in a moment of creative desperation, Hartley recognized something his competitors lacked—a distinctive character.

"I was kind of rummaging around in the box of kid stuff. It was a drawing I had in my desk. My son drew it," Hartley recalled. "He definitely had a vision, and I have a sense of memory of him presenting it as, 'Hey, you should do this.' I didn't really react to it until I had to in a moment of panic. It was like, yeah, we could do this. Let's design a bot. That really played to me because other networks, they had an eyeball, they had a peacock, they had a thing, you know?"

The problem: FOX's in-house graphics department lacked the technology to execute the vision. Early prototypes were rough, forcing Hartley to outsource the project to Blur Studio, known for high-end visual effects in feature films.

Hollywood Meets Sports Television

Blur Studio co-founder and director Tim Miller understood what FOX wanted: a cinematic 3D spectacle that defied typical sports graphics conventions.

"FOX wanted a big 3D extravaganza. It just so happens that one of the things CG did well, almost from the beginning, was robots. We did some really out there ones. I think in the design brief, we really knew what it needed to be," Miller said.

Hartley's creative direction leaned heavily on cinema. The original theme drew inspiration from the Batman films, while Cleatus itself was conceived as FOX getting ahead of Michael Bay's Transformers franchise aesthetic.

Bringing Motion to Metal

Animating Cleatus required motion capture sessions that went beyond standard digital recreation. Miller and his team used stunt performers padded up and dressed in motion capture suits, hitting them like linebackers to generate authentic movement data.

"We had our own motion capture studio. It's really fun to do stunt guys where you can hit them. So, we had a whole bunch of pads, and I was a big believer in hitting like a linebacker. You get these great animation impacts because they're real and they occasionally get hurt. But that's what was interesting about it," Miller said.

Cleatus's personality emerged from studying actual players—how they moved during warm-ups, the subtle flourishes that separated authentic athleticism from stiff animation.

"His personality was really derived from players—the way they moved, the way they warm up. You become the master of the hidden trick like pulling something and sliding under it because you don't want it to be stiff. You want it to be kinetic," Miller explained.

Two Decades of Character Work

Over 20 years, Hartley layered personality onto the robot. Cleatus has donned pom-poms like a cheerleader, performed hula dances in a grass skirt, and appeared hung over during New Year's Day broadcasts. The character has become as much a part of FOX's NFL identity as the play-by-play announcing.

Next season, when Cleatus turns 21, the network will have a new milestone to celebrate—the mascot that was born from a child's sketch and refined through Hollywood-grade production now rivals any traditional sports network branding in longevity and recognition.