On Saturday, the Colorado Buffaloes came through with an incredible Hail Mary from Shedeur Sanders to LaJohntay Wester to tie their game against the Baylor Bears, which they’d eventually win in overtime.
That brought up memories of Colorado’s 1994 Hail Mary from Kordell Stewart in the Miracle at Michigan, as play-by-play announcer Connor Onion referenced on the Fox TV broadcast. But it also brought up memories of some of a much more obscure and much more recent call, with one wildly viral tweet pretending it was the Baylor radio call:
BAYLORS COMMENTATOR WAS PISSED LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOO😭😭😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/7Vw8sAD9WE
— BIGMEM12 (@BIGMEM12) September 22, 2024
That tweet from @BIGMEM12 had 3.2 million views, more than 45,000 likes, and nearly 5,000 retweets as of 10:20 p.m. ET Sunday.
However, it’s far from the actual Baylor radio call of that game. You can find that call, from John Morris and JJ Joe, here, via Baylor Athletics on YouTube. (Start at the 3:56:58 mark if it doesn’t automatically do that.)
That’s a notable call in its own right, and it does have a raised voice (“Oh, he may have caught it! He did!”) from Morris, but he certainly isn’t going “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” That kind of line is most popular for Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader’s one in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. But the particular sports usage of it put over the Baylor-Colorado highlights above by @BIGMEM12 actually comes from Canadian university football.
There, the Queen’s Gaels faced the Western Mustangs on Sept. 16, 2023. Western hit a last-second Hail Mary not dissimilar to what the Buffaloes pulled off here. And Jesse Bell, calling the game for Queen’s campus radio station CFRC, let out this “NOOOOOO!!!” call. That quickly went reasonably viral, which we covered a few days later.
Like many older things, Bell’s call is now coming back around at least partly thanks to TikTok. A properly attributed (or, at least, set over the proper video) version last year got more than 100,000 plays:
@ryan_sprite you can hear the pain in his voice 😭😭😭 #western #football #collegefootball #nooo #angry #fyp #short #shorts #anouncer ♬ original sound – Ryan🔥
But it’s since been used for all other unrelated highlights. Like…one from a 2021 Philadelphia Eagles-Detroit Lions NFL game, put out six days ago? On a running play with the score 41-0? And that has 2.2 million plays?
@smittycentral noooooo #fyp #nfl #eagles ♬ devonta smith is my king – smitty
Or an old Baltimore Ravens-Pittsburgh Steelers game, with 200,000 plays?
@beattyemeatoff #tiktok #foryou #viral #Fyp #foryoupage #football #announcer #nooo ♬ original sound – Youatemysandwich
At any rate, Bell’s call is going remarkably viral again.
And it’s being claimed as the call for all other things, including Baylor-Colorado. (And it does really work well there, as that play allows for Bell’s nonchalant “Touchdown Western” at the end of the original call to be used, considering that the TD here came from LaJohntay Wester.)
Perhaps, if this keeps getting remixed and repurposed, Bell may get notoriety on the same level as Brian “Boom goes the dynamite” Collins. (Although that may not be a good thing.) But while this call may well apply to many of these other games, it didn’t come from them. But it’s remarkable to see how it’s spread and how it’s been used.
[@BIGMEM12 on X/Twitter]