The first-ever YouTube NFL game was… certainly something. For the most part, it looked and sounded like any other NFL game broadcast. But it was sprinkled with its fair share of influencing and content creation. And its grand finale was MrBeast shooting a Chiefs fan out of a cannon.
The YouTube broadcast featured many stars from the platform, not only in the form of watchalongs on separate streams, but as part of the broadcast itself. And it was clear that the NFL went in this direction for its Friday night Week 1 game not just because Google wrote the largest check, but as part of a concerted effort to reach younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans.
Young people are less and less invested in sports, so leagues like the NFL have to be innovative when it comes to reaching out, even if it means doing things that you will never see anywhere else and would leave much of the viewing audience wondering what they just watched.
The perfect microcosm of that was the grand finale of the YouTube broadcast, which featured arguably the platform’s biggest star in Jimmy Donaldson, otherwise known to the masses as MrBeast.
The premise of his presence was a segment featuring one Chiefs fan and one Chargers fan. You may recognize Merrianne Do as the Chargers fan who went viral during a Monday Night Football broadcast years ago and then had a whole thing revolving around her if she really was a Chargers fan. The internet can be weird sometimes.
Anyways, since the Chargers won, Marianne received two tickets to the Super Bowl. And since the Chiefs lost, fan Chris was launched out of a cannon through some inflatable goalposts and into a lake.
Your entertainment value probably depends on how much you enjoy this kind of content and likely whether or not you were born before the turn of the century. You could see it as totally cringe. Or you could think it was the best thing ever.
But what is funny about this MrBeast segment is that it really looked like it was pre-recorded. That means there is a version where the Chargers fan is being shot out of a cannon while the Chiefs fan is celebrating winning Super Bowl tickets. Perhaps that explains the less than enthusiastic and organic responses throughout the segment.
It is hard for us to get invested in this given the pre-recorded, staged nature of it though. Let’s raise the stakes if we try this again and make it a bit more real. Make it Dave Portnoy and Paul Finebaum for the next Big Ten-SEC clash and we could have the greatest segment in sports media history. And do it live.
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