Stream It Or Skip It?

College football is one of America’s favorite sports, and the Southeastern Conference on of the sport’s greatest hotbeds. With a new season only weeks away, Netflix is looking to prime your pump with SEC Football: Any Given Saturday. The series takes the now-familiar Drive To Survive format and applies it to Saturdays down south, following (some) of the league’s teams through the 2024 season.

Opening Shot: A high-energy montage of gameday in the SEC, set to dramatic music and paired with voiceovers talking about how it Just Matters More down here. “SEC teams are winning the national championships, and that’s how it’s been for a very long time,” one pundit notes in between highlights, and as a Midwesterner myself, I cannot let this pass without noting that Big 10 teams have actually won the last two championship games, and SEC teams didn’t even make those games. (But yes, the conference is very important.)

The Gist: Over the course of the season, Any Given Saturday is going to cover ten SEC teams, which is going to necessitate some jumping around from episode to episode. The first episode focuses much of its runtime on the LSU Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks, with the teams’ head coaches driving the conversation, but additional color provided by some of their players. This is intercut with practice and game footage, all filmed live for the series.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? After Die Hard redefined action-movie blockbusters in 1988, it became a trope that every action movie for years to come was “Die Hard on a _____” (Under Siege was Die Hard on a boat, Passenger 57 was Die Hard on a plane, Cliffhanger was Die Hard on a cliff, and so on.) Why do I bring this up? Well, Drive To Survive was a huge success for Netflix a few years ago, and there’s been a number of “Drive To Survive on a ____” shows since. (Full Swing for golf, Break Point for tennis, Tour de France: Unchained for cycling, and so on.) It’s fair to say that Any Given Saturday is “Drive To Survive on Saturday in the South”.

Our Take: As noted above, I’ve covered a lot of different flavors of this format of show. Ever since Drive To Survive opened F1 racing to a huge swath of new American viewers, streaming services and sports leagues have been hungry to replicate that success for themselves.

I come at SEC Football: Any Given Saturday from a different perspective than I did the golf, tennis, cycling and whathaveyou-focused ones, though: I’m an avid college football fan. I’m a season-ticket holder for a team that made the College Football Playoff in the last five years. I wrote for a college football blog for many years. Most of my casual wardrobe is college football t-shirts. In one sense, you’d think I’m the perfect target audience for a college football-focused program–but really, I’m not. Drive To Survive wasn’t a success because it satisfied longtime F1 fans; it was a success because it created new ones.

Taken in that light, can SEC Football: Any Given Saturday be a success? Well, it just might.

More caveats first: though the show’s focus is on the Southeastern Conference, one of college football’s two premier conferences (along with the Big 10), the filmmakers didn’t get access to all sixteen member schools. Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri–some of the league’s biggest brands–aren’t participating. Also, there’s the matter of focus: F1 racing convenes in a single race each week, where SEC football can be spread over a dozen or more games per Saturday. That necessitates a lot of jumping around, and hampers the ability to craft cohesive narratives.

Still, it’s a well-done program, and it gets both the substance and the flavor right. If you’re a newbie fan, someone who’s generally warm to the idea of college football but don’t know where to jump in? Any Given Saturday could be just the primer you need. Football fandom can be hard to jump into–the rosters are large, and everyone wears helmets on the field; you can’t as easily get a sense of the personalities involved the way you might with basketball or tennis. The behind-the-scenes footage that backbones a series like this, or like HBO’s long-running NFL show Hard Knocks, is a great springboard to forming emotional attachments to a team.

Or, heck, against a team. Maybe you’ll watch the scenes with LSU head coach Brian Kelly, a person I intensely dislike for a number of reasons, and you’ll decide to root against him. Congratulations, you’re now a college football fan!

(We all hate him. Especially LSU fans.)

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Our two episode-one teams converge in a Week 3 matchup, with LSU visiting South Carolina for what turns into a barnburner of a game, with the LSU holding on for a 36-33 win, their first conference victory of the year. The Tigers leave town ebullient; the Gamecocks are left to lick their wounds. “It’s a team at LSU that’s really talented, and we just went toe-to-toe with them,” South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer notes dourly. “It’s a great reminder that it’s a very thin line between winning and losing.”

Sleeper Star: There’s plenty of opportunities for players to shine as the show jumps around the country. Some good early soundbites come from Whit and West Weeks, brothers and linebackers for LSU who show off their country-boy charm and great hair as they go duck-hunting together a few days before their season opener. “Playing USC this week, the first game, I’m making it kinda personal for me,” West notes. “I’m not gonna let these West Coast dudes come in here and push us around, you know. We’re from the South, we play real football.”

(Once again I must be a contrarian and note that USC won that game, 27-20. Spoiler alert.)

Most Pilot-y Line: “I have my life, mortgage, and everything associated with 18- to 21-year-olds, what am I doing?” laughs LSU head coach Brian Kelly, who I should note makes ten million dollars a year.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re a hardcore college football fan, then this is just an appetizer before the season starts. If you’re college football-curious, though, then SEC Football: Any Given Saturday is a great way to get your foot in the door for a new Saturday obsession.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.