A dodgeball highlight from ESPN: The Ocho.

With it being 8/8, ESPN has gone to “The Ocho” branding for ESPN2 for the second-straight year, turning a joke from the 2004 film DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story into a real thing. The whole day will see ESPN2 showing obscure sports, from spikeball to the U.S. Open Ultimate Championships to brat-eating, cornhole, kabbadi and hurling. And of course there’s dodgeball, both normal and on trampolines. It’s the latter, from the recent (last week) Skyzone Ultimate Dodgeball Championships, that produced this highlight of two players being knocked out by a single throw:

I think there’s an appropriate DodgeBall GIF here:

That’s a cool highlight in and of itself, but it’s also interesting that it was tweeted from the main ESPN account (which has a modest 33.6 million followers, and where they’ve changed the profile picture to an Ocho logo). That speaks to the amount of play ESPN is giving this “Ocho” branding day, and it’s notable that many of their social accounts and personalities have already been promoting this:

Embrace #TheOcho. Hey, it has to be better than Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman yelling at each other, right?

[ESPN on Twitter]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.