The NFL season gets underway this Thursday with Detroit Lions at reigning Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs, so to get you in the mood today I’m talking about the the new Netflix documentary about the University of Florida Gators that dropped on Netflix about ten days ago and which I watched across two nights this week.
The four part series is part of Netflix’s Untold strand and looks at the hot run that the Gators went on in the mid-2000s under coach Urban Meyer and with star quarterback Tim Tebow. It looks at how the team went from massive underdogs to double champions – and how it could have been more. There are sit down interviews with all the key figures and lots of match and locker room footage.
I’m an NFL watcher (although not really college football so much) so it’s maybe not a surprise that I would be interested in this, but why should you watch this if you’re not an American football fan? Well Him Indoors is emphatically not an NFL person, and he came in midway through episode 1 and got hooked and wouldn’t let me watch it without him. And I think that’s because it’s such an interesting slice of culture and sport. In the UK we have teenage sports stars coming through all the time – but they go into teams where the other players are a range of ages and experience. In college football everyone is between 18 and about 22 and in this period they’re also amateurs – they’re playing the sport alongside studying in the hopes that it will propel them in to the NFL. They’re also the rock stars of their universities – with students following them around campus and tens of thousands turning out to watch them play: the Gators’ stadium, known as The Swamp, has a capacity of nearly 90,000 – which is about the same size as Wembley Stadium here in the UK. So these guys playing for the Gators are basically like premier league footballers, but without the salary and while students. And if any of you remember what the rugby team at your university got up to for initiation (it’s always the rugby team, don’t know why) you’ll have a sense of some of the stuff going on in the locker rooms and the sort of ethos. It’s absolutely wild – and a little bit disturbing at times.
In fact a lot of this series of Untold looks pretty good – they’ve got a doc about another college football star – Jonny Manziel – and one about the Balco doping scandal that I think I’ll watch, and one about Jake Paul which I’m pretty sure I won’t!
Have a great Sunday everyone.
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