My Favorite Way to Watch College Football: DIY Hype Videos (Published 2023)
I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin, a place where football reigns supreme. I wasn’t much of a fan, but many of my classmates showed up as die-hard supporters. Their fanaticism wore me down, and eventually I joined the crowd of fans who packed Darrell K. Royal Stadium for every Saturday home game. I, like everyone else, got caught up in the annual cycle of expectation, fanaticism, disappointment, and acceptance.
I could never fully embrace the game, though. I found it odd to see boys in their late teens and early twenties, many of them black, playing in a packed stadium at the flagship university of the only state that seceded twice—once from Mexico and then again from the Union—so it could continue to subjugate black people. Meanwhile, the university sold the games as part of a storied tradition while ignoring shameful details, like the fact that Texas had one of the last major college football programs to integrate, or that its most celebrated coach, Darrell K. Royal, objected to the team’s integration in 1959.
How could I reconcile my discomfort with my love of the game? Enter hype videos: DIY compilations of divinely timed stiff-arm kicks, the best jukes you’ve ever seen, otherworldly one-handed back-diving catches, and otherworldly feats of athleticism.
Some colleges create their own official hype reels, along with shortened versions for TikTok and Instagram, to promote their football programs to fans and recruits. Some of these are very good, but overall, they’re a little disingenuous—I feel like I’m being lied to when I scroll through Instagram and come across offensive highlights for Iowa football, a program notorious for its perennially bad offense. These videos are also aesthetically predictable, usually starting with solemn shots of a stadium meant to convey the program’s accomplishments. More than anything, these videos are propaganda driven by executives and communications strategists, meant to burnish the brands of team executives and communications strategists. They’re not necessarily bad, but they have little to do with the players’ experiences.
I prefer the unauthorized DIY projects from YouTube accounts with names like Sick EditzHD And Dog B. Without team obligations or licensing laws, their videos are rare examples of passion seeping through the cracks in college football’s carefully maintained facade. Instead of bland orchestral scores or generic hip-hop beats that sound like they were created by an AI, these clips are set to trap music, a gritty Southern hip-hop subgenre named for the drug-dealing milieus in which it originated. Importantly, trap is the music that many college football players actually listen to. The reels are soundtracked by unlicensed, aggressive remixes of pop songs and explicit versions of Future and other rappers that would almost certainly never be used in official hype videos.
These numbers accompany shots of players piercing the offensive line to make vicious sacks, grown men throwing other grown men to the turf, and sublime 60-yard touchdown passes. Videographers often use the same clips over and over, but I don’t mind. Nearly a dozen times before the 2016 season, I saw JuJu Smith-Schuster, a wide receiver at the University of Southern California, point at an oncoming defender before gave him a brutal tap on the arm as the USC line erupted in celebration. I’d happily watch those 17 seconds a dozen more times.
Unofficial hype videos give us a glimpse into the culture that we can’t see on TV. They bring us closer to that world than any broadcast.
The hype-video author’s view of college football is probably much closer to the players’ than the NCAA’s. There are no family-friendly, business-oriented considerations in these artistic cases of copyright infringement. The most profitable teams don’t get a disproportionate amount of airtime. For Dawg B and his contemporaries, a good play is a good play, whether it comes from college football royalty like Alabama or a brash insurgent on the sport’s fringes. They also emphasize the culture of the players: These videos freely show college athletes doing the griddy while celebrating big plays, something the NCAA punishes.
These videos are an unintended guide to how college football should be presented. Nearly half of Division I college football players are black; the game is traditionally a black experience, reflected by largely white commentators, fans, boosters, coaches and television executives. But the presentation of the game on television obscures black culture and turns football into a boring business. This version of the game is a lucrative business arrangement hiding behind a facade of dignified amateurism that no longer exists.
Unofficial hype videos give us a glimpse into the culture we can’t see on TV. They bring us closer to that world than any broadcast. There’s no corny color commentary, no players hanging around between plays, no footage of coaches inhaling millions of dollars of public money. Instead, we get to see players egging each other on, leaping into end zones, swag surfing, catching the woah—just being really good at the game and carrying a multibillion-dollar industry on their backs. Watching them, you get a whiff of their exuberant self-confidence: Failure of any kind is unthinkable for both you and the players. There is no mediocrity in a world built to bass-boosted Lil Durk tunes.
Image Credits (left to right): Brian Murphy/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Chris Williams/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Jeff Haynes/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images; Bryan Lynn/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Peter Joneleit/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; David Rosenblum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.
Ali Breland is a reporter at Mother Jones, where he writes about the Internet and politics.
