My Favorite Way to Watch College Football: D.I.Y. Hype Videos – The New York Times
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 dyed-in-the-wool devotees. Their zealotry wore me down, and I eventually joined the fans who packed into Darrell K. Royal stadium for every single Saturday home game. I was swept up, along with everyone else, in the annual cycle of anticipation, fanaticism, disappointment and acceptance.
I could never wholly embrace the game, though. I felt strange watching guys in their late teens and early 20s, many of them Black, play in a packed stadium at the flagship university of the only state to secede twice — once from Mexico, and then again from the Union — so that it could keep enslaving Black people. All the while, the university sold the games as part of a storied tradition but ignored 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 integrating the team in 1959.
How could I reconcile my discomfort with my love of the game? Enter hype videos: do-it-yourself compilations of divinely timed stiff arms, the most beautiful jukes you’ve ever seen, otherworldly one-handed backward-diving catches and other athletic feats.
Some colleges make their own official hype reels, along with abridged versions for TikTok and Instagram, to promote football programs to fans and recruits. Some of these are very good, but on the whole they are a little dishonest — it feels as if I’m being lied to when I’m scrolling 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 a program’s achievements. More than anything, these videos are propaganda controlled by administrators and communication strategists, meant to burnish teams’ brands of administrators and communication strategists. They’re not necessarily bad, but they have little to do with the players’ experiences.
I prefer the unauthorized D.I.Y. ones from YouTube accounts with names like Sick EditzHD and Dawg B. Beholden to no team and no licensing laws, their videos are rare examples of passion creeping between the cracks of college football’s carefully maintained facade. Rather than the staid orchestral scores or generic hip-hop beats that sound as if they were made by an A.I., these …….