Fox and ESPN both paid a lot of attention to Utah QB Bryson Barnes raising 12,000 pigs

There’s often a notable cycle with unusual background facts on athletes. A lot of the time, those get briefly mentioned in a written profile, then get some Twitter talk, and then get to a point where they’re referenced on studio shows and game broadcasts. The latest example of that comes with Utah Utes quarterback Bryson Barnes’ time working on his family’s pig farm growing up, which led to the Fox game broadcast of Utah-Oregon Saturday even putting that Barnes raised 12,000 pigs on a graphic, and citing that as “most in FBS”:

https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/1718357125221523822

There, Gus Johnson describes this with “His parents own a pig farm with about 12,000 pigs. And he grew up working the farm, got his hands dirty. And now he’s the starting quarterback for this team, coming off a terrific game.” And that was also explored in an ESPN College GameDay feature Saturday, which included them visiting the pig farm and talking to his family:

https://twitter.com/ESPNCFB/status/1718278604415471674

There are some notable lines in there from Barnes about his time raising pigs, including him saying “It’s the work’s gotta get done type of mentality. It doesn’t smell great, it doesn’t matter. It’s never going to smell great. Get the work done.”

There’s been plenty of talk about Barnes and pigs before amongst Utah fans and media outlets covering the team, with some even dubbing him “The Pig Farmer.” And his story has drawn wider attention, with him getting more playing time this year thanks to Cam Rising’s injury and leading Utah to a road win against USC. After that, Breaking T even came out with a t-shirt in partnership with Barnes and the Utes:

https://twitter.com/BreakingT/status/1716529382745919778

The “pig farmer” talk then escalated further this week, including with CBS’ Dennis Dodd writing it up in a column Friday. And then GameDay ran that feature Saturday morning. And then Fox put their own spin on it on the game broadcast, including with that “Most in FBS” stat. (We’d really like to see how much research they put into that one, and how many other FBS players have raised large quantities of pigs.) It is certainly a cool and unusual thing to mention, but hopefully broadcasts won’t beat this into the ground going forward, something that’s been known to happen in the past.

[Awful Announcing and ESPN CFB on Twitter]