I went 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 emerged as dyed-in-the-wool devotees. Their zeal wore me down, and eventually I joined the fans who packed Darrell K. Royal Stadium for every Saturday home game. I was drawn, along with everyone else, into the annual cycle of anticipation, fanaticism, disappointment, and acceptance.
I could never fully embrace the game, though. It felt strange to see kids 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 from the Union—so that so you can continue to enslave the blacks. All the while, the university sold the games as part of a storied tradition, but ignored embarrassing details like the fact that Texas had one of the last major college football programs to integrate or that its most famous coach, Darrell K. Royal, opposed the incorporation of the group in 1959.
How could I reconcile my discomfort with my love for the game? Enter promotional videos: build your own compilations of divinely timed stiff arms, the coolest jukes you’ve ever seen, eerie one-handed backhand catches and other athletic feats.
Some colleges create their own official hype reels, along with condensed versions for TikTok and Instagram, to promote football programs to fans and recruits. Some of it is pretty good, but overall it’s a little dishonest — I’m being lied to when I scroll through Instagram and come across offensive snaps about Iowa football, a program notorious for its perennially bad offense. These videos are also aesthetically predictable, usually starting with official shots of a stadium meant to convey a program’s accomplishments. More than anything else, these videos are propaganda controlled by managers and strategists, intended to promote the teams’ managers and strategists brands. They’re not necessarily bad, but they have little to do with player experiences.
I prefer unauthorized DIYs from YouTube accounts with names like Sick EditzHD and Dawg B. Beholden to no team and licensing laws, their videos are rare examples of passion creeping between the cracks of college football’s carefully maintained facade. Instead of steady instrumental scores or generic hip-hop beats that sound like they were created by artificial intelligence, these clips are set to trap music, a raw Southern hip-hop subgenre named for the drug-dealing environment of which it came from. Importantly, trap is the music that many college football players actually listen to. The reels’ soundtracks are aggressively unlicensed remixes of pop songs and straight-up covers by Future and other rappers that will almost certainly never be used in official promotional videos.
These songs accompany shots of players drilling through offensive lines to make vicious sacks, adults throwing other adults to the turf, and glorious 60-yard touchdown passes. Video makers tend to use the same clips over and over, but I don’t mind. Nearly a dozen times before the 2016 season, I watched JuJu Smith-Schuster, a wide receiver at the University of Southern California, point at an oncoming defender before brutally arming him as the USC sideline erupted in celebration. I would happily watch those 17 seconds a dozen more times.
Unofficial promotional videos give us a view of the culture that we don’t get to see on TV. They bring us closer to that world than any show can.
The promo writer’s vision of college football is probably much closer to the players’ vision than the NCAA. In these elaborate cases of copyright infringement, there are no family-friendly, business considerations. The most profitable groups do not have disproportionate airtime. For Dawg B and his contemporaries, a good game is a good game, whether it comes from members of college football like Alabama or a brash rebel on the sport’s fringes. They also highlight gamer culture: These videos show college athletes freely doing the Griddy as they celebrate big plays, something the NCAA sanctions.
These videos are an unintended guide to how to present college football. Nearly half of all Division I college football players are black. the sport is typically a black experience refracted through predominantly white commentators, fans, boosters, coaches and television executives. But the televised presentation of the game erases black culture and drags football into a bland corporate affair. This version of the sport is a lucrative business scheme hidden behind a facade of respectable amateurism that no longer exists.
Unofficial promotional videos give us a view of the culture that we don’t get to see on TV. They bring us closer to that world than any show can. There is no public color commentary, no players hanging around between plays and no videos of coaches inhaling millions of dollars of public money. Instead, we see players going up and down, spinning in end zones, swag surfing, catching the woah — they’re just super good at the sport and riding a billion-dollar industry on their backs. Watching them, you get a whiff of their exuberant confidence: Any kind of failure is unthinkable for you and the players. There is no mediocrity in a world that listens to Lil Durk’s bass-enhanced songs.
Photo credit (from left): 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.
