NC college football teams are in an arms race that leaves players dripping in a pond
The latest addition to the college football arms race has players rising out of rivers, or tromping through forests, or strutting over mountains. It has them dressed in these moments, in full uniform, as if a football game is about to break out in nature, among the rocks and the trees.
For decades, that so-called arms race has followed predictable rhythms of extravagance and gluttony, a never-ending game within a game to outspend and out-build rival institutions. It’s why even assistant coaches often command annual salaries in the seven figures, and why things like barber shops and nap rooms and miniature golf courses have become standard fare in facilities.
Yet the latest addition to the arms race is not measured by money or buildings. It is instead a competition defined by the intangible currency of the internet: likes, shares, impressions, views.
It’s why, more and more, football players have wound up in the woods, ready for game day. It has happened again and again this season, and last, with enough frequency that the internet-attuned college football observer, casual or fervent, might have been left with a question or two:
Why are these young men walking through the woods, or emerging from water, as if they are about to play a game? Are they taking a particular scenic route to the stadium? Are they seeking a tranquil escape from the inherent pressures of the sport, like more muscular and helmeted versions of Thoreau seeking their own kind of Walden Pond? And what’s with the camera crew following them around? And the videos? And dramatic music? And the splashing and juking and ...
What is all this, exactly?
The answer is that it is about hype. And showing off a school’s particular “drip,” which to the uninitiated means style or swagger, or both. For example, if one were to say to another: “Hey there — you’ve got the drip, and let me tell you, friend, that outfit is so wet,” it would be a compliment, a statement of admiration. (Note: Readers older than, say, 22 should avoid attempts to use “drip” or “dripping” or “drippy” outside of describing a leaky faucet.)
A long time ago, before social media, college football teams unveiled their uniforms when they ran onto the field in the moments before a game. “Oh,” spectators might have thought then, “I like the combination the team is wearing today; looks nice.”
Nowadays, though, uniform reveals, in dramatic video form, present an opportunity for content creation — for marketing and for recruiting, and for a school to connect with its (mostly younger) fans. There has come to be an art form to the college football uniform reveal on social media, and that art form provides a window into the greater world of content creation — the newest and most evolving form of competition among schools.
“You’re focusing more on the entertainment side,” said Mathew Fedder, the assistant director of creative services for the North Carolina football program, recently.
Viral uniform reveal videos
There’s no shortage of supportive proof, starting with the uniform reveal videos that sometimes go viral, and other times lead to a chorus of fans claiming that such-and-such school has stolen an idea from another that did something similar not too long ago.
Take, for instance, the recent video of a uniform reveal at Virginia. It began with an aerial shot above Carter Mountain, near the school’s campus in Charlottesville, with the reds and yellows of autumn starting to cover the trees. Then it followed a pair of players sauntering in nature, showing off their gloves and their navy jerseys, one holding a football, the other a state flag.
That video followed a similar one at North Carolina, filmed in a wooded corner of campus near Gimghoul Castle, where the leaves looked a particularly radiant shade of orange. And that video followed a similar one at Duke, filmed in what looked a lot like Eno River State Park (the school did not respond to questions), with a player rising out of a river, dripping (literally) in his jersey. And that video followed an almost identical one, last season, at Appalachian State.
The App State uniform reveal, filmed amid a picturesque mountain waterfall backdrop, is perhaps the granddaddy of outdoor uniform reveals, or the OG, as the target audience might put it. Other schools did outdoor reveals before, but App perhaps perfected the genre before anyone else realized it was becoming one. The school produced and posted the video days before the 2020 season-opener, a victory against Charlotte.
It begins with serious-sounding music, and a shot of roaring Trash Can Falls, about 11 miles from campus. Almost instantly, the camera pans to a football floating (for some reason) atop the water. Then you see a few bubbles and, timed to a foreboding note of music, a player (wide receiver Thomas Hennigan) rises out of the water like a creature of the forest. He appears angry, or perhaps unable to control his excitement at being spawned from a river in full uniform.
He splashes. He flexes. He splashes and flexes some more. The video zooms in on the details of the jersey — the Nike swoosh, the App State logo — and ends with Hennigan atop the rocks, king of the mountain, posing as if to invite a challenge.
Max Renfro, the Appalachian State student who created the video with a team of other students, estimated recently that the video, which was picked up by ESPN and other media and across several platforms, has been viewed 50 million times.
“It’s invaluable to basically get free impressions like that,” Renfro said.
Renfro, a senior majoring in digital marketing, has worked with App State football since his freshman year. During that time he has experienced firsthand the evolution of content creation in college athletics, and particularly in football. It has gone from the periphery to the mainstream, though App, unlike its peers in more wealthy conferences, hasn’t yet hired full-time content creators. Renfro said he’ll make about $1,000 this year for his work, which is regularly viewed by tens of thousands of fans, and has become part of the Mountaineers’ brand.
“That kind of motivates us,” Renfro said, “to create the best product with what little resources we have. I’d say our team of students could go up head-to-head against any of those full-time people, and it’s really cool to see that we could do that without the money.”
He acknowledged that App’s version of the water uniform reveal wasn’t necessarily the original. Miami did something similar in 2018, when it promoted wearing Adidas jerseys it said had been made from recycled plastic from material found in the ocean. And one day, too, Renfro was watching TV and saw a Navy SEALs commercial that featured a soldier rising out of the water.
“I was like, ‘Wow!’ ” Renfro said. “I want to do that with a football player.”
And so he did, launching a wave of imitators.
The uniform combo reveals have become a staple of schools everywhere, a regular piece of scheduled content. If an older generation of fans might have connected with their favorite college football team through the head coach’s weekly radio call-in show, younger generations, including potential recruits, connect with schools through their social media presence.
As a result, the schools that can afford it have hired an army of 20-something content creators to keep up with the never-ending demand for new pieces of media.
The demand for content
The uniform reveals have become one regular feature, but then there’s everything else: the more general pregame hype videos; the postgame clips of celebratory locker room or on-field scenes; the highlights that, in the past, might’ve had a short shelf life on SportsCenter or the local evening news, but can now live on forever, and in more of an uncut form, on a Twitter timeline or Instagram or TikTok feed.
And that’s just the work that fans might see on a team’s feed. There’s more, still.
“For a lot of creative programs, our jobs are focused on telling the story of the team and especially during the season, we’re working on that story,” said Fedder, of UNC. “But this is the side that fans don’t see, is our hundred photoshoot albums that we send to recruits after a visit, and our custom graphics that we’re sending to hundreds of prospects every week via DM.
“So there definitely is a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in that aspect.”
Fedder was a UNC student when in 2016 he began working for the football team’s video department under then-head coach Larry Fedora. In 2019, after he graduated, he became the school’s first full-time “camera creative,” as he put it. When Mack Brown dances with his team in the locker room after a big victory, it’s Fedder and his crew of student workers who share that moment with the world, through video posted on the team’s social media platforms.
Game days are busy for Fedder but so are recruiting weekends, either in-season or out, when the school might host several prospects at once during their official visits. Those visits come with a photoshoot for each prospect, and those photoshoots then come with an album that Fedder sends out to the player, a small taste of how the school would use its creative prowess to promote the player and his image.
The modern college football player’s branding efforts begin before he ever arrives in college in the first place, and Fedder sees his work as part of the sell.
While players consider “which program is going to help represent their name, image, likeness,” Fedder said, “a massive part of their thought process is, ‘which school has the best creative program to brand myself into someone that can get drafted?’
“Because yes,” Fedder said, “their play on the field matters. But these kids, their brand matters a lot, too. And so we have to understand that this new generation of athlete is very conscious of their brand and how they can monetize that off the field. And so our job is to kind of showcase that to them while they visit, in that process, to kind of pitch that to them.”
Fedder said he sent one recent prospect, whom he described as “high profile,” 350 edited photographs the day after his visit. And now, thanks to a recent NCAA rule change, custom videos for recruits will become another means of competition among schools.
Until last week, schools were only allowed to provide prospects with static graphics — think a player wearing a customized (but virtual) pair of Air Jordans, or depicted in an image surrounded by text or in a Photoshopped gameday environment. Now, after the NCAA rule change, schools are allowed to provide recruits with custom videos, which will undoubtedly lead to the kind of creative one-upmanship that has become common with things like the uniform reveals.
“I think what we’re going to see is every single program around the country will have to add a position to be able to manage these custom videos,” Fedder said last week. “Because it’s going to become another arms race ... And, frankly, we already got asked for a video for a recruit, and it got passed two hours ago.”
Playing catch-up
Athletic departments have already been racing to catch up to peers that embraced creative content strategies when such things were less prevalent. Clemson, which has an assistant athletic director for “Creative Solutions,” has long been considered one of the national leaders in producing and disseminating made-for-social content. Ohio State is another. Others, and perhaps the majority of schools, have been slower to devote resources to content creation.
There’s App State, for instance, which uses students to drive its social media presence. At UNC, Fedder is the unofficial manager of creative content for the football program, which last summer added another full-timer, a graphic designer and recent Florida State graduate named Zach Hamman. At Virginia, which became one of the latest to be inspired to go into nature for a uniform reveal, two full-time creative content producers are new hires, in their first six months.
Their positions at Virginia didn’t exist a year ago.
“There’s a lot of these creative positions that are starting to pop up at all universities,” said Ose Imeokparia, whose official title is Creative Director for Virginia football. “I remember when I was in college, I went to a small school in Connecticut, but we didn’t really have anyone doing creative work for us. It was just, you take the pictures at the start of the season, and that was pretty much it. So the past couple of years, these positions have popped up. You want to have creatives in these roles to help tell that story, build up that program that you want it to be.”
Taylor White, the Assistant Director of Creative Video at Virginia, joined the school’s athletic department six months ago. It’s her first full-time job in the field, after she was a creative intern for the football team at Wake Forest, where she attended graduate school. At Virginia, she’s responsible for the uniform reveal and “most of the time,” she said, players “are just excited to be in the video.”
“Everything is on social media now,” she said. “Not a lot of people watch TV. You can get highlights from Instagram or Twitter, instead of watching SportsCenter. So I feel like the way that social media is evolving, it’s really important. And, like Ose said, the bulk of our job is to reel recruits in, and that’s how the program grows.”
On average, she said, those uniform reveal videos can take about 90 minutes to shoot, and then about five-and-a-half hours to edit — about a full day’s work to produce a clip that usually lasts around 30 seconds.
With any luck, the video might catch on and fans might engage with it, or it might even go viral. Or, even more significant, a prospect might see it, and think the helmet decals or small uniform touches — the logos, maybe even the gloves — look particularly drippy.
This story was originally published November 24, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
