FX’s American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez isn’t a football show. It’s a scripted anthological series about the life and death of the former New England Patriots star, depicting, in deep detail, heavy topics like domestic abuse, child abuse, homophobia, drug use, concussion effects, murder, and suicide. But six episodes in, the football stuff—especially the casting of B-list (if we’re being generous) actors to play some of the most famous names in the sport, the wild dialogue, and the intense depictions of football scenes—has been the most entertaining part of the series. (FX literally just did this with Clipped, another scripted anthological series that attempted to cover serious topics like Donald Sterling’s racist comments but was instead viewed as a largely unserious show because of the ridiculous casting decisions and performances.)
It starts with Hernandez, portrayed by Josh Rivera, who doesn’t exactly look the part of a pro athlete. We see him celebrating a touchdown catch he made with two feet out of bounds. He runs a 40-yard dash like he’s Rich Eisen and runs routes like Drake. But the show is loaded with ridiculous NFL and college football name drops and characters from Hernandez’s college career at Florida and his NFL years with the Patriots.
Most of the name and cameo stuffing baked into the show feels much more performative than actually additive to the story. What did executive producer Ryan Murphy get right about the football part of Hernandez’s life? What were the best and worst casting decisions and football depictions? Let’s rank them all:
Honorable Mention: Brandon Spikes, Jordan Reed, Wes Welker, Roger Goodell
None of these characters play major roles in the series, but either they have flashes of screen time or their names are mentioned in a very intentional way. Any longtime college football or NFL fan watching the show will spend the first six-ish episodes like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme:
Brandon Spikes, played by Daniel Bellomy, was a teammate of Hernandez both at Florida and with the Patriots and mostly contributes only to the show’s depiction of the homophobic culture at Florida.
Jordan Reed, played by Ricardo James Patterson IV, appears as a freshman during Hernandez’s final year of college, ready for a bigger role once Hernandez goes pro. Wes Welker, played by Brett Tomberlin, gets a mention here because he is the one who asks Hernandez to leave the showers and return to the practice field to bring pads back to the locker room in Episode 5, “The Man.” Though I know it’s probably not an accurate depiction of what happened, the series’ portrayal of Welker being an asshole to Hernandez is quite the choice. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (Jonathan Walker) is shown speaking at what looks like a rookie symposium after Hernandez was drafted by the Patriots. In his address to the incoming rookies, Goodell calls the NFL “the single most important institution in American life today” and says that players must use the tools the league has provided them to “protect the shield.” This all tracks.
Tom Brady, Vince Wilfork, Jerod Mayo, Josh McDaniels, hell, even Matt Patricia are also squeezed into the series one way or another, but none of them have high-impact moments like the rest of the famous football names on this list. Speaking of which …
7. Maurkice Pouncey and Cam Newton
Pouncey (Edgar Sebastian Martinez) and Newton (Warren Egypt Franklin) are each depicted as contributing to a homophobic culture and participating in hazing at Florida, but only Newton has an obvious callback moment. I still can’t believe the show managed to fit in the stolen-laptop-out-the-window fiasco inside a 10-episode series about Hernandez’s trauma, murders, and suicide, but alas:
6. Robert Kraft
The two best moments of the Kraft (Jerry Levine) experience in American Sports Story are his initial reveal (in the clip below) and when the Patriots owner drops the line “Behind every great man is a better woman.” I’m still trying to figure out whether he was talking about his late wife, Myra Kraft (Kate Goehring), or a different woman … say, in Jupiter, Florida.
5. Steve Addazio
The introduction of Addazio (Scot Ruggles) in Episode 1 is quite the jump scare. He enters the mix as the man stalking Hernandez in the street with his car. It’s funnier than it is scary, to be fair.
Addazio, who was Urban Meyer’s offensive coordinator at Florida, nearly takes a rock to the face in his hunt for Hernandez because he’s overly eager to pitch him on why the tight end should pick Florida over his local school, UConn, while Hernandez’s abusive, controlling father isn’t in the room. It’s obviously not an ethical way to approach the recruiting trail, but the show depicts it as an effective one. Plus, have ethics held anyone back in college football recruiting, let alone coaches inside the Meyer regime? Addazio is just doing his job, same as the casting director did theirs by finding an actor with the Addazio ’stache. Uncanny!
4. Rob Gronkowski
I’m starting to feel bad for Gronkowski at this point. The hits just keep coming. He might still be recovering from all the jabs at his intelligence in Netflix’s Tom Brady roast, and now he’s got to deal with Laith Wallschleger’s very brief, and very dumb, Gronk impersonation.
This is the only time we hear Wallschleger as Gronk speak in the entire series. It’s a one-note performance, and that note is simply stupid. Wallschleger (who, we must note, has been cast to play the Travis Kelce–esque football player in Lifetime’s Chiefs Christmas movie) doesn’t even look anything like Gronkowski! He sounds like him, sure, but that’s only because he’s Gronk’s real-life friend and has had the requisite time to perfect his slow, labored talking style and ridiculous laugh. The fact that the replies to the above tweet are almost a 50-50 split between calling the performance horrible and calling it Oscar-worthy tells you everything you need to know.
3. Bill Belichick
Give Norbert Leo Butz an Emmy now. I don’t care that he is doing the Belichickian shrug so much that he looks like the sugar water guy from Men in Black; his performance as the Patriots head coach is reason enough to watch this show. We first see him in the NFL draft scene with Kraft, but his series highlight is when he’s rocking out to Bon Jovi alone in his office. For all the creative liberties the production team took with this show, this seems to be entirely plausible.
I’m also partial to Butz going full football historian in a way only Belichick can.
2. Tim Tebow
OK, I have a lot of thoughts here. My first gripe is with the casting. Patrick Schwarzenegger is simply not hot enough or jacked enough to play Florida-era college football God Tebow. I wouldn’t even like Schwarzenegger cast as BYU-era Taysom Hill! He just doesn’t have the aura. (Or is it rizz?)
The neck-to-neck comparison alone leaves Schwarzenegger dead to rights. Neck thickness matters. The boy-next-door-meets-meathead-athlete vibe is key to the Tebow aesthetic, almost as much as his religious views.
In the show, Tebow is depicted as the angel on Hernandez’s shoulder, responsible for helping Hernandez in college. Still, this scene of Hernandez’s come-to-Jesus moment is something.
Yes, that’s Tebow preaching at a church event in Episode 3, “Pray the Gay Away.” Schwarzenegger nails Tebow’s Southern preacher pitch and cadence, but the sermon falls flat as Tebow cosplay.
Following Hernandez’s visit to Tebow’s celibate swamp, Hernandez is shown reading, per my comprehensive Google search, a fictional book that has some very heavy-handed chapter titles …
I watched this part of the show back a few times. I just can’t help but laugh at the fact that the show made up a book to illustrate to the audience that the two of “Jesus’ Rules” that Hernandez clung to after his baptism-by-Tebow were “Homosexuality” and “Drinking and Drugs.” It’s hard to know for certain that that’s what the show wanted the audience to get out of Hernandez’s relationship with Tebow until Hernandez is shown quickly deleting gay porn off his computer and flushing his weed down the toilet, kicking off a montage set to “Million Bucks.”
The good news is, despite the casting and some of the writing, real-life Tim Tebow’s reputation feels undamaged by the show. The same can’t be said for Urban Meyer.
1. Urban Meyer
If Tebow is the series’ angel, Meyer (portrayed by Tony Yazbeck) is the devil. The series really does paint a dark, almost evil persona for Meyer. He’s shown convincing Hernandez’s mother to send her son to Florida early, shortly after the death of his father. That’s the first of an onslaught of moments in which the show chooses to depict Meyer as someone who prioritizes winning and his own career over Hernandez’s well-being.
We get a scene in which Meyer throws the tight end out of practice by his face mask after he messes up a play. (Knowing that Meyer kicked a kicker during his short tenure as the Jacksonville Jaguars’ head coach, this sadly feels tame!)
Even off the practice field, Meyer is a menace. In an argument with his wife about how he won’t cut the bad apples on the team because they’re good football players, he says, “You like this house? The cars, the jewelry, the private schools? If I don’t win, it all goes away.” He then starts hyperventilating, something he does again later in the show in the depiction of the famous “dehydration” moment after Florida’s 2009 loss to Alabama. (Meyer tells a doctor that he’s popping Prilosec “like it’s candy” in one of the episodes; he was not doing well.) Meyer later tells his wife while watching Hernandez win the John Mackey Award that the “kid’s going to end up in the Hall of Fame … or prison.”
It’s simply a bad look for Meyer every way you slice it; the show creators—probably very fairly—pulled no punches. The best part of the Yazbeck casting decision is that he looks enough like Meyer for it not to be distracting (unlike the casting decisions for Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Blake Griffin, etc. in Clipped).
The same could be said for most of the casting decisions in this show, honestly.
Yazbeck, Rivera, Butz, and Ruggles all generally look like the real-life characters they play. That’s not enough to keep the focus on Hernandez’s story over the loud Easter egg football moments, ugly football plays, and oversimplified dialogue, but, hey, at least FX got a few laughs out of one of the darkest NFL stories of the century.
