More than a year ago, at something like 3 in the morning London time, U.K.-based filmmaker Katharine English hopped on a conference call and tried to convince 20 or so dudes from across the pond to trust her. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know a lot about American football when I started,” English tells The Ringer, speaking about Untold: Swamp Kings, a new four-part Netflix miniseries about the late-aughts Florida Gators in all their infamously unholy—and wholly American—glory.
In the span of five seasons, beginning in 2005, the Gainesville football team hired a brash, bonkers new head coach in Urban Meyer, alighted on a blessed quarterback in Tim Tebow, and won two championships and missed out on a couldashouldawoulda third. And it also made—and sought to bury—headlines about players’ dalliances, iniquities, and straight-up arrests. Untold: Swamp Kings, which airs this Tuesday, indulges in the stories of this disparate group of talented once-youngsters who share the uncommon (and frequently uncomfortable) experience of being united (and torn asunder) by gridiron greatness (and greed) in a very particular place and time.
“There was an arc to it that was fascinating,” says English. “I’ve made a film called Our War about a British army behind enemy lines. I made a film about 9/11—two firehouses in New York after the terrorist attack. So I’m really curious and interested in men in extreme circumstances. And it was just such a privilege that they agreed to take part.”
Built around interviews with more than a dozen Gator players and coaches, and buoyed by a cache of contemporaneous UF football program footage, Untold: Swamp Kings revisits a particularly hectic and high-flying era in college football. Viewers see objectively cruel weight room sessions disguised as team bonding and also merry scenes of booster-facilitated poolside splendor. They hear sentiments ranging from “Everything you’ve got, play your balls off!” to “I don’t even want my kids to know that version of me existed.” And all of this is just one of the numerous football-forward projects recently advanced by Netflix that seek to capture both immediate buzz and long-tail attention from as wide an audience as possible. It’s an ambitious playbook indeed.
Last December, during a tech and media industry conference hosted by the investment bank UBS, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told attendees not to expect his company to shell out big bucks for live sports broadcasting rights anytime soon. “We’re not anti-sports,” Sarandos said at the time. “We’re just pro-profit.” Never say never, Sarandos hedged, but also: “We’ve not seen a profit path to renting big-league sports.”
It was an assertion that stood in contrast to the actions of some of Netflix’s competitors then and since. In 2021, Amazon signed an 11-year, billion-dollar deal to broadcast Thursday night NFL games. Last winter, Google’s YouTube TV agreed to spend $2 billion annually for the rights to Sunday Ticket. And Apple has inked several billions’ worth of multiyear agreements for Major League Baseball and Soccer. (The offer that recently lured Lionel Messi to play in Miami reportedly includes a cut of the escalating revenues generated by new subscribers to Apple TV+’s MLS season package.)
Given all of that, Sarandos was asked in a conference call last month for an update on his strategy. “Our position in live sports remains unchanged,” he replied. “We’re super excited about the success of our sports-adjacent programming.” It wasn’t “the liveness of the game” that mattered, he said. It was having programming “that’s in-season year round.”
To some extent, these words smacked of sour grapes. In June of last year, Netflix was reportedly one of several parties that did not win the bid to air Formula One racing in the U.S.—the very sport that the streamer popularized in the country with its Drive to Survive documentary series. But none of this language was new for Sarandos. He was disparaging “live-ness” back in 2016. He was justifying “sports-adjacent” programming in 2021.
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Netflix isn’t new to the sporting world. Its 2016 original series about the guys playing for small-scale NCAA football teams, Last Chance U, ran for five seasons. Its 2017 investigative feature Icarus, about doping in the Olympics, won an Oscar. And sports documentaries and behind-the-scenes projects have been around since long before Netflix’s offerings: HBO and ESPN, to name two legacy brands, have been investing in shows like Hard Knocks and umbrellas like 30 for 30 for years. But Netflix’s slate this year shows that it has accelerated its pace of production while elevating its reputation and connections.
There are the meet-the-sport series like Drive to Survive, which has aired five seasons, and its descendants Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf). There are the nostalgia-rich and memetastic definitive texts like Michael Jordan’s 10-part The Last Dance, which was a coproduction with ESPN and originally aired in 2020. There are the more recent ambitious, ongoing projects like Quarterback, which was produced in conjunction with Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions and featured Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota in its appealingly goofy eight-episode debut season.
And there is the Untold family of projects, which, in the words of series cocreator Chapman Way, is “really drawn to complex and provocative characters and story lines” and seeks interviewees that “don’t really care how you think about them or feel about them, or how you view their opinions.” Which is why, in addition to the 2005-10 Florida Gators, this season’s subjects include BALCO doping guru Victor Conte; boxing and energy drink influencer Jake Paul; and Former Heisman Trophy winner, Texas A&M quarterback legend, and famous NFL flameout Johnny Manziel.
Manziel says the first Untold production he ever saw was the 2021 documentary about tennis player Mardy Fish, and he “just thought it was amazing.” Manziel appreciated the way the Netflix filmmakers handled the topic of Fish’s mental health and how they “dove into his whole story,” he tells The Ringer over Zoom.
Earlier in 2021—about five years after Manziel was unceremoniously cut by the Cleveland Browns, concluding an NFL career that featured defiant pregame trips to Vegas and zero point zero zero minutes spent reviewing plays on the team-issued iPad—the guy once hailed as “Johnny Football” had started a podcast with a buddy called Ball Don’t Lie. He greatly enjoyed the experience. “It was an amazing opportunity to be able to sit down and be open and candid about, just, some of the struggles that I had,” Manziel says. “It gave me more of a freedom to kind of go and tell it the way it is, and let it be.” By the time he was approached a year later by Netflix about a possible documentary collaboration, the opportunity felt right.
The resulting project, Untold: Johnny Football, directed by Ryan Duffy, traces Manziel’s rapid ascent and stall out on the football field, as well as in his public and private lives. It shows him becoming the first freshman to ever win the Heisman (over Manti Te’o, another Untold subject from a couple of years ago) and also becoming the latest catastrophe at QB for the Browns. It features interviews with Manziel’s family members and former coaches, and some with more vivid enablers like an estranged once-best-friend known as “Uncle Nate” and a braggadocious NFL agent (“Straight out of central casting for Entourage, you know?” says Way), each of whom helped Manziel fib his way to money, fun, and ruin. It intersperses clips of Manziel leading Texas A&M to a Cotton Bowl win with assertions that one of the most oft-cited pieces of information about him—that he was the heir to a huge Texas oil fortune—was, if not a total lie, then definitely an exaggeration.
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As Uncle Nate tells it, he and Manziel pushed that narrative, which was woven with shreds of truth, in order to better distract from all the perks and freebies Johnny got everywhere he went. Manziel sitting front row at an NBA game and taking a private plane around? Definitely not NCAA rule violations! Just the kind of thing fossil fuel scions do! Maclain Way, the other Untold cocreator, had a big reaction to learning about the oil fabulism. “I was like, I fell for that story line!” he says. “I’m watching our own documentary, and I’m like, This son of a bitch!”
Manziel says that he’s wondered what his life might have been like in a post-NIL world, when his moneymaking ventures could have been, comparatively, on the up and up. “Honestly, who knows?” he says. “I think it would have given me the opportunity to stay in school for longer. Something that I probably wish now that I would have been able to do.”
Instead, his path took a different turn, one that the film addresses but doesn’t really delve into. Manziel won the Heisman in 2012. But by 2016, he’d been cut by Cleveland, arrested more than once, charged with domestic violence against his then-girlfriend, and described in the media as “a druggie” by his dad. Untold has been criticized for taking this tack, notably by former quarterback Ryan Leaf, who opined that he felt the film did Manziel a disservice by not reckoning fully with his addictions and mental health. Manziel, for his part, told Pat McAfee that he was happy with the portrayal. “I definitely felt the weight of: You have messed up such a huge opportunity here, you know?” Manziel tells The Ringer. “What’s next? Is anything next?”
Maclain and Chapman Way, who are brothers, were working with Netflix for years before they launched the Untold series in 2020. Six years earlier, the company released “a baseball documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball that we directed. So we kind of started it all,” Maclain jokes. (The film tells the story of a baseball team once owned by their grandfather, the actor Bing Russell—one of whose children is their cool uncle Kurt.) Now in its third season, the Untold banner has been extended, moving beyond projects the brothers have helmed directly to ones that are produced by third parties but that fit the gestalt of the series—like Swamp Kings.
The miniseries was produced by a British company called RAW Productions, in conjunction with the Derek Jeter–helmed operation The Players’ Tribune. As director, English may not have had a background in American football, but she clearly succeeded in winning over her subjects, who are forthcoming and expansive on tape about a sometimes heady, sometimes heartbreaking time in their lives. Swamp Kings is also a departure from the typical Untold format in that it consists of four episodes, each 45 minutes long. This is almost certainly a result of one of the project’s biggest jackpots: a cache of, according to English, 650 tapes recorded by Florida athletics staff, footage that makes up a good deal of the film.
“That was just a complete bonanza,” English says of the find. “We heard rumors about tapes that were somewhere in a box, under a desk. … And eventually we found them, and there were 650 of them, and they covered the entire period.” The footage shows everything from Meyer’s motivational speeches to his upbraidings, following the team from in-game sidelines to off-books weight room events. “Really iconic evening sessions, which they used to call ‘the midnight lift,’” English says. “Where all the players would get dressed up in ripped clothing and they’d have body paint, warpaint, and they’d go for the weight-lifting session. Like, you know, beyond one’s imagination.”
When you’re watching the footage, though, what sticks out most is how little of this feels beyond one’s imagination because the majority of the people involved were just … guys. Guys who relished the attention they’d earned or shrank beneath it. Guys who just wanted to win. Guys who had the impulse control of teenagers because that’s what they were. Guys who broke the law in manners ranging from the trivial to the truly upsetting. Guys whose problems were handled, and even erased, by well-connected local lawyers. Guys like Brandon Siler, who in the series tells a particularly human story about the time Meyer met his parents. Guys like Ahmad Black, who pretended he didn’t care what Coach yelled at them but who secretly, agonizingly did. Guys like Tebow, who says in the documentary that even as a kid, he was so competitive that he never understood it when coaches would say the important thing was to just go have fun out there. No wonder he wound up playing for a guy like Meyer, for whom fun was solely a function of wins.
Not all of Netflix’s football content is about men in such extreme situations. Some of it is just about a dude in a short-sleeved button-down shirt that was picked out by his wife. It took Quarterback producer and director Tim Rumpff all of a day to recognize that Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins was the perfect fit for his newest assignment.
A longtime veteran of NFL Films, where his work has included producer credits on the stalwart HBO series Hard Knocks, Rumpff wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he showed up to film with Cousins. But he soon realized that he had a genuine character on his hands, the kind of guy who roams the self-help aisles of Barnes & Noble on his self-imposed off day, who is into neurofeedback training (and even more questionable woo), and who has seemingly never met a group photo that he didn’t invite himself to join.
“I called [showrunner] Joe [Zucco] right away,” Rumpff says. “I was like, ‘I think we might have something here with Kirk.’”
“You might have said, I’m in love with Kirk,” corrects Zucco.
“Yeah, I probably did say that,” says Rumpff. “It was love at first sight. But yeah, I was like, all right, if this is how the first day is going to go, this is going to be a pretty special project.”
Quarterback also spent the 2022 NFL season putting a magnifying glass to Patrick Mahomes, with his adorable attempts at trash talk, his shut-you-up arm, his DGAF wife, and his stubborn, magnificent slog to a Super Bowl. The series also shadowed Marcus Mariota, whose up-and-down season ground to a mysterious and bittersweet halt at almost the exact time he became a new dad. The three main characters make for an illuminating look at a range of NFL talent.
“I watched this [NFL] season differently than I watched any other season,” Zucco laughs. “Kirk gave me a heart attack every single week.”
For people like Zucco and Rumpff, Quarterback was distinct from projects like Hard Knocks not just because it was developed over the course of a full season, but also because it aired with enough hindsight to allow them to develop clarity. Some of the show’s finest and most educational moments, for example, occur when viewers are shown the full heft of all the mental gymnastics and cryptic word games that go into the routine act of calling plays in a huddle. “The fact that this dropped months after the season certainly allowed us a little latitude that we would not have been afforded on an in-season weekly show,” Zucco says.
Over the past month of NFL training camp, one question has been reliably asked of just about every quarterback: Will you be doing the Netflix show? Rumpff says that having Peyton Manning as one of the show’s producers has helped attract talent. But that doesn’t make it an outright easy sell. “That’s not for me,” answered Jimmy Garoppolo, though he added that his buddies loved the show. “I get enough media,” said Cowboys QB Dak Prescott, explaining why he had said no. “This team gets enough coverage.” Quarterback, it seems, might be a lot like its subjects: vulnerable to a sophomore slump once the splashy product catches up with the advance scouting.
This summer, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow said that while he was open to the idea, he wasn’t interested in participating this season. But sometimes someday comes sooner than you think. Recent hints from NFL insiders Peter King and Boomer Esiason suggest that Burrow might indeed be one of the featured QBs on the show’s second season. And who knows: Maybe down the road, if enough passers suffer from stage fright, Netflix can simply pivot to a spinoff series, like Offensive Lineman, say, or Cornerback.
For his part, Chapman Way says that one thing he appreciates about developing sports content for Netflix is that there isn’t a thorny web of conflicting interests involved since the company isn’t simultaneously airing the live sports that it covers. “The awesome thing about Untold,” he says, “is that we don’t really have any deals or partnerships with these professional leagues. So it kind of allows us to really dive in and tell some provocative stories.”
That said, there are indications in both the Untold and the Quarterback series that suggest it’s not always corporate relationships with leagues that get in the way of telling all—sometimes, it’s the human connection to the subjects. Putting together a documentary isn’t just about finding the perfect old news clips. It’s about securing participation: wrangling people and egos and reputations and hoping you don’t lose sight of the plot. (This isn’t a new tension: In order to secure Michael Jordan’s participation in The Last Dance, filmmakers extended him editorial control, a situation that Scottie Pippen railed against in his memoir.) To remain a going concern, a show like Quarterback has to be all-access enough to feel special, but not so invasive that it scares future subjects away.
Which is probably why it politely elides Cousins’s stance on the COVID-19 vaccine, for example, or why it mostly looks around whistling and pretending not to notice whenever Mahomes’s malefactor brother is around. In Untold: Johnny Football, there are times when Manziel’s pleasantly blunt accounting of his most irresponsible highs and most painful lows feels like a tactical defensive maneuver designed to head off probing follow-up questions. English, the Untold: Swamp Kings director, recently defended her choice to mostly steer clear of digging into the full story of Aaron Hernandez, a former Gator who got into some trouble in Gainesville and was later convicted, in 2017, of first-degree murder. She noted that the bulk of the late Hernandez’s criminal activity took place outside the scope of time covered in her film—and also that Netflix already covered the subject in its three-part documentary Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. But English also mentioned that “the players themselves didn’t want an overemphasis on [Aaron]. And they made that very clear from the beginning.”
You can see how and why these negotiations and decisions get made, and they’re becoming increasingly common in the world of the sports documentary. But it would have been elucidating to know even a little bit more about how Meyer covered for the troubled player, or about what changes Manziel has made in his life, or about just how steep of an uphill climb Mariota now faces post-Falcons.
Even with those questions and concerns, though, indications are that Quarterback, at least, has generated impressive viewership for Netflix. In his second-quarter earnings remarks, Sarandos called the show “a great one.” He also noted that actually, there is a live sporting event on Netflix’s upcoming agenda after all: a golf tournament this fall. But this didn’t stem from some partnership with LIV Golf or the PGA Tour, nor did Netflix enter a negotiation to win some golf major’s rights. Instead, it’s a custom, novelty competition that will pit athletes from two Netflix shows—Full Swing and Drive to Survive—against one another in “a promotional vehicle,” as Sarandos called it. (Hopefully it will go better than Netflix’s last foray into live programming, a haywire Love Is Blind reunion.) “We can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing,” the CEO said.
Netflix may not be in the business of bidding billions for live sports rights at the moment, but that doesn’t mean the company has abandoned its competitive drive. While its attempt to nab Formula One rights last year didn’t win out, it nevertheless upped ESPN’s annual cost from a previous deal of around $5 million annually to a number upward of 15 times that.
And in July, it was Netflix that reportedly beat out both Amazon and ESPN by spending $50 million on one of the hot properties of the season: a 10-part documentary series on Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. You don’t have to know much about American football to know that it doesn’t get much more American football than that.
