A friend who had gotten early access to the new SEC series on Netflix texted me the other day. “I’m on the fourth episode of the Netflix show and I believe I will refer to it in print as the Andy Staples As David Attenborough Introduction,” Seth Emerson of The Athletic wrote. For the uninitiated, […]
A friend who had gotten early access to the new SEC series on Netflix texted me the other day.
“I’m on the fourth episode of the Netflix show and I believe I will refer to it in print as the Andy Staples As David Attenborough Introduction,” Seth Emerson of The Athletic wrote.
For the uninitiated, the 99-year-old Attenborough is a longtime BBC host who over the past 20 years became the go-to narrator for nature documentaries. If you had 4K footage of a bird of prey scooping up and devouring a fuzzy woodland creature, you called Attenborough to provide a soothing soundtrack for the carnage.
If that’s a casting director’s takeaway from SEC Football: Any Given Saturday, I’ll take it. I’m happy to set any documentary scene where a college football coach on the hot seat absolutely needs a win to avert disaster. Besides, Attenborough has probably never even seen an Arkansas football game.
But you’re probably not worried about casting the next wave of sports documentaries. You’re probably wondering if this show that chronicles the 2024 season is worth a binge to help calm your college football cravings as the long offseason nears its merciful end.
I can’t give you an objective review. I’m in the show. (Full disclosure: I didn’t get paid except to reimburse travel expenses for a couple of shoots.) Also, I’ve known executive producer Collin Orcutt since we worked together at Sports Illustrated, so I already knew before the first frame was filmed that Collin would treat college football with the mix of awe and curiosity it deserved. After watching every episode, I can confirm that he did.
The question you probably want answered is this: Does this show tell me anything I didn’t already know?
This has been my issue with a lot of the streaming service sports documentaries. They promise a deep, inside look at a subject but deliver a product that probably fascinates a general audience but tells the hardcore audience nothing new.
You subscribe to On3, so you’re part of the hardcore college football audience. A show will have to go deep to teach you something. I promise you’ll learn a lot watching this one. Because I provided commentary for the show, I knew pretty much all the episode topics. I obviously watched all these games when they happened because it’s a job requirement. Yet I still found myself glued to the screen watching Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia engineering an upset against Alabama or Florida’s Billy Napier coaching his way off the hot seat.
The production had access to most (but not all) SEC programs. School officials got a chance to see everything before it ran, but it doesn’t appear they censored much. Cameras were invited onto the sidelines and into meeting rooms, coaches’ homes and players’ apartments.
Any Given Saturday comes from Box To Box Films, the same production company that makes Formula 1: Drive To Survive and Full Swing. Drive to Survive helped fuel F1’s popularity in America thanks to an unfiltered look at that sport. Part of the charm of that show is how catty the team principals and drivers are on camera. While SEC coaches can be that catty behind the scenes, they don’t lob verbal grenades at one another on this show.
What they do offer is brutal honesty about some of the highest pressure jobs in sports.
- Arkansas coach Sam Pittman talks openly about the possibility of getting fired.
- So do South Carolina coach Shane Beamer and his wife Emily.
- Napier explains the difficulty of managing the Gators’ QB situation with veteran Graham Mertz and freshman D.J. Lagway.
- LSU coach Brian Kelly allowed the production team to film a conversation discussing the future of Tigers QB Garrett Nussmeier with Trace Armstrong, who represents Kelly and whose firm Athletes First also represents Nussmeier. It’s weird, and it’s emblematic of the sport in a time of rapid change.
If you don’t know their stories — or even if you do — you’re probably going to fall in love with Pavia, Vandy coach Clark Lea, Florida’s Mertz and LSU linebacker Whit Weeks. You’ll have a better understanding of why Florida players didn’t quit on Napier when all seemed lost*. You’ll want to run through a wall every time South Carolina staffer Derrick Moore appears on screen.
*The sequence showing Florida fans signing Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down between the third and fourth quarters of the Kentucky game is the most visually stunning of the series, but the field-level view of Vandy fans storming the field after the Alabama game is a close second.
What helps the series is its length. The one-hour docs that highlighted Johnny Manziel or Connor Stalions or the Urban Meyer-era Gators didn’t have enough time to go deep enough to satisfy the people who followed those stories in real time when they happened. Any Given Saturday is seven one-hour episodes. That gives all the schools that offered premium access time to have their stories told. It’s the same reason people who know what happened in every F1 race last year still binge Drive To Survive whenever a new season drops.
If you’re mad that your team isn’t featured, don’t call Netflix. Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and Ole Miss have minimal exposure because they didn’t want to participate. If you’d like to see them in a future season — assuming there are more — then tell your school’s AD and/or head coach to say yes.
I’d love one of these for every conference, and not just to get more cracks at an Attenborough impression. I’d watch the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten versions. I told the production team that they’d probably find the best access and the best stories in the Sun Belt. Drop the seasons throughout the summer to a football-starved audience and watch the people binge.
The question is whether a wider audience that includes non-college football fans and even non-sports fans will embrace college football the way it has Formula 1 and golf and NFL quarterbacks. We’ll have to wait to find out. The SEC has as passionate a set of fanbases as any league in sports worldwide, but succeeding on Netflix is about appealing to people who don’t live and die with you. When I asked what to wear for the first shoot, Orcutt cracked “Just pick something you don’t mind 50 million people seeing you in.”
The sport will get exposed to more people than that thanks to this show. But how many of them will watch?
And how many will decide Diego Pavia is their new favorite Netflix QB?
Category: General Sports
