Dr. Pepper chest pass competition. Screengrab via ESPN.
By Awful Announcing Staff on

For years we have chronicled one of the most absurd phenomenon in the history of the human race. The Dr. Pepper chest pass.

It seems like forever ago that at each major conference championship game in college football, Dr. Pepper would sponsor a competition where students would compete to throw footballs into giant cutout Dr. Pepper cans in the hopes of winning some money. It sounds like a great idea in theory. In theory. But while the creators of the contest might have envisioned something beautiful along the likes of Hank Hill and Don Meredith, what they got instead was an absurd competition that looks nothing like the game of football.

Instead, competitors have found the most logical and efficient way to try to compete – chest passing footballs.

Although it’s something you would never see in a game and goes against everything football should stand for, it sure works if you’re trying to throw as many footballs through a hole in a huge Dr. Pepper can in a limited amount of time. And it’s now risen to the point where it’s become a running joke, even to the broadcasters like Kirk Herbstreit and Kevin Negandhi.

“Anything but the chest pass, I’m not a big fan of that,” Herbstreit said.

Sorry Kirk, but that’s exactly what you got once again on Friday night at the Pac-12 championship game.

Of course, the easy way to fix this would be to mandate some kind of overhand throwing motion. Of course, that’s obviously too complicated to do. But here’s the hilarious thing, Dr. Pepper has actually been embarrassed by this in the past! In fact, Dr. Pepper once upon a time asked Sam Ponder to delete a tweet making fun of the chest passes and the whole thing got to the point where she didn’t host the competition.

Let’s see just how much pull Dr. Pepper has now that even more ESPN personalities are calling it out. If Kirk Herbstreit is mysteriously absent from ESPN’s college football playoff coverage, we’ll know who truly has the power to rule college football.