Maybe it speaks to the dedication of the Pardon My Take Audience. Maybe it speaks to the brotherhood of college football fans. In all likelihood though, Barstool star Big Cat benefitted from a lack of live sports whenever he would log onto Twitch to play NCAA Football 2014. The seven-year-old college football video game still enjoys a cult following, and that cult grew thanks in part to Big Cat’s created coach Gus Duggerton, who is better known online as “Coach Duggs.”
Since launching Duggerton’s career in the game’s “Dynasty” mode back in March, Big Cat has seen his audience slowly grow. It certainly didn’t hurt that college football coaches and media got caught up in the excitement.
The Twitter presence of Coach Duggs can only be described as another triumph for Barstool on social media. The character has nearly 51,000 Twitter followers. A secondary character, Tennessee’s made up quarterback Caleb Pressley (another Barstool personality and a former QB and Supervisor of Morale at the University of North Carolina), is verified by the site and has more than 149,000 followers.
While Pressley’s account is mostly filled with retweets, a real life representation of Coach Duggs has generated some great audience engagement and created very funny videos.
Coach Duggs, who as of Monday morning is still the head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, led his team into the 2017 BCS National Championship on Sunday, June 7. Pardon My Take’s Twitch channel experienced a record audience. Despite losing to the Virginia Tech Hokies, Big Cat, Duggs, PMT, and the Vols nearly doubled their largest audience ever.
The Tennessee storyline has been the peak of this campaign for Big Cat and Coach Duggs. For those unfamiliar with the mechanisms of NCAA Football 14’s Dynasty Mode, after each season, coaches are offered new jobs and can choose to take them or stay in their current role. Speculation of Coach Duggs’s future by his followers has already spiraled out of control.
solid article, but Caleb Pressley is a real person at Barstool that Big Cat named the QB after.
You’re correct. That should’ve been included in the piece. I made the adjustment. Appreciate the heads up.