Happy 20th Birthday, Cleatus! A Look at How FOX Mascot Was Born

Cleatus is now firmly a young adult.

The popular FOX Sports mascot celebrated its 20th birthday during the 2025 NFL season, marking two decades of Cleatus making an appearance on televisions across the nation on NFL Sundays. As the robot has become a mainstay in FOX's NFL coverage, FOX Sports executive vice president & creative director Gary Hartley's mission to create an iconic animation in Cleatus has been fulfilled. 

But the process of creating Cleatus wasn't easy. In a recent video for NFL Films, Hartley explained the difficulty of trying to create a unique animation package for the NFL on FOX to help make the network's NFL coverage stand out from its competitors. 

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

As Hartley struggled to find something to make FOX Sports' NFL coverage unique, he stumbled upon something that his son, Andrew, had drawn, which drew inspiration for the creation of Cleatus. 

"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. I think he was 8 or 9," Hartley said. "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 drawing helped give birth to Cleatus, but it didn't bring the robot to life just yet. 

"A lot of the impetus of Cleatus for me was, ‘Look, we'll have a thing,'" Hartley said. "We had kind of a prototype, but the technology that was available to us at