What we learned from Netflix's SEC football documentary, ‘Any Given Saturday'

New York Times

8 hours ago

These appeared to be the final days of the Billy Napier era at Florida. So much so that a Gator fan can be heard yelling 'Bye, Billy,' as the beleaguered coach walked off the field following a loss last October to Texas A&M. An awkward moment caught by a Netflix camera crew, which was still filming minutes later when Napier addressed his team in the locker room.
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'It's critical that we stick together. It's going to be hell out there,' Napier tells his players, pointing at the walls. 'It's going to be hell on the outside. Do not allow them to divide us.'
This was one of several locker room scenes caught by Netflix cameras, who followed around a majority of SEC teams last year. There is South Carolina coach Shane Beamer, after a close loss to LSU, telling his team, 'we let their ass off the hook.' There is Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea, in his pregame speech before an upset of Auburn, claiming he overheard an Auburn coach tell his players, 'they're still Vanderbilt and we're still Auburn.'
'Think about that s—!' Lea shouts at his players. 'This is absolutely about earning some goddamn respect.'
And in quieter moments, there is Arkansas coach Sam Pittman talking frankly about a game being important to keep his job. There is Beamer's wife, Emily, saying she doesn't like to leave the house and face people in the community after a loss. And the cameras are on inside LSU coach Brian Kelly's car as he talks with his agent Trace Armstrong, who also represents Garrett Nussmeier, about whether the LSU QB should turn pro.
'Interesting world we live in,' Kelly tells someone off-camera after the call ends. 'He's my agent. But he's representing players that are on my team.'
SEC Football: Any Given Saturday, a Netflix Sports series offering an exclusive look at key matchups throughout the SEC season, premieres August 5.
Witness the unparalleled pressure, commitment, and raw emotion it takes to be a D1 football player in college football's leading… pic.twitter.com/qY62OaKqvT
— Netflix (@netflix) July 14, 2025
Netflix has scored hits with sports documentaries going behind the scenes on Formula One, the PGA Tour and the NFL in recent years, among others. Now college football gets its turn: 'Any Given Saturday' is available on Netflix starting Aug. 5, with a seven-episode run that covers the 2024 season through an SEC lens.
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Formula One gained popularity in the U.S. after 'Drive to Survive' debuted in 2019. Paul Martin, the English executive producer for Box to Box Films, which produced both 'Drive to Survive' and 'Any Given Saturday,' was asked if they were aiming to do the reverse this time, bringing college football to a worldwide audience.
'I think the truth of it is when we're making these shows, I try not to think about who the audience is going to be,' Martin said. 'As we never did on Formula One, we never sat down and said, 'Hey, can we do a show that really introduces the sport to an American audience. We just went out and we made what we thought was the best show possible, and hopefully people get on board with that and see that and agree that they like it. We certainly want to keep the SEC fans happy. It would be great if new fans come in.'
SEC coaches are notorious for their secrecy, and six of the conference's biggest brands — Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss, Missouri and Oklahoma — chose not to let Netflix film them. The series does suffer from not having those big brands. Tennessee was the only College Football Playoff participant that allowed Netflix to film, and its presence seems tacked-on, making only a late appearance in the final episode.
But the series does have compelling moments.
South Carolina and Vanderbilt, which had the two most surprising, feel-good seasons, are prominently featured. Napier's escape from the hot seat — at least for one year — is well chronicled in the second episode. So is Florida's quarterback switch from Graham Mertz to DJ Lagway — and Mertz let Netflix cameras come in the room as he prepared for ACL surgery.
'You're the first person to ever shave my leg,' Mertz tells a nurse technician.
The show, released as preseason practice before 2025 begins, may be about the 2024 season, but most of the players featured are back, including Lagway, Nussmeier, South Carolina QB LaNorris Sellers, Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia, Auburn WR Cam Coleman and LSU LB Whit Weeks. And with no SEC head coaches being fired last season, all the coaches are back, too.
The episodes delve into how close some came to not being back.
Pittman, speaking before Arkansas faced then-No. 5 Tennessee last October, is frank about his job status, if not for him, for people like his administrative assistant, Izzy Dunn.
'I want to decide when I want to walk out of here. Because I don't want these people in this building getting fired,' Pittman says. 'The head coach gets $10, $15 million to get fired. That lady out there (Dunn), she gets nothing. Two weeks (severance). So this week feels like a really big game.'
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Arkansas ends up getting the win, which is a shared focus of the third episode — along with Vanderbilt's upset of Alabama. That was a lucky break for the show, which had to be choosy about where it went and happened to have a crew there for that game.
The production had four separate pods of crews, spread around the SEC footprint. They couldn't be everywhere with all 10 teams, so they had to be strategic with games and practices. There's a lot that didn't make the cut, and some teams (such as Kentucky) hardly got airtime.
Recognizable college football personalities — Paul Finebaum, Andy Staples and Alyssa Lang — serve to set the scene. There's plenty of football; the camera shots are mostly via the sideline, so it's not just television replays.
But the on-field action comprises a small part of the series. And lest it seem pure SEC propaganda, the first episode homes in on LSU losing to Southern California, and the second episode opens with Florida losing to Miami. The latter sets up the story of Napier's seeming fall, with Gator fans clamoring for Lagway to start, and Napier eventually pulling out of it.
'Credit to Florida, when you would fully expect them to shut down, because they were under so much pressure internally and externally, they let us keep the cameras rolling,' Martin said.
Martin described himself as a longtime Miami Dolphins fan and had lived in Los Angeles. So American football wasn't foreign to him, but he had 'never really gotten into college football,' he said.
A contact at Creative Artists Agency, who was a 'Drive to Survive' fan, suggested Martin do a college football documentary. When Martin said he wouldn't know where to start, CAA suggested the SEC, which used CAA to sell its media rights. An introduction was made to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, with discussions beginning in the summer of 2023. They went to an athletic director's meeting in North Carolina, and then a coaches meeting in Birmingham, Ala., along with Netflix officials, presenting the vision to the coaches.
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The filming was done quietly, with Netflix and the SEC not officially announcing the deal until after the season.
'I mean, it was great,' said Taurean York, a linebacker at Texas A&M who was filmed with his family eating Thanksgiving dinner. 'The crew ran it the right way. They mic'd you up for practice. They watched practice. They had you doing stuff after practice with them. They just want to see what it was like to be a Division I football player.'
Pavia, the Vanderbilt quarterback, is one of the brash co-stars of the show, dishing out one-liners about Auburn coach Hugh Freeze ('He had an opportunity to recruit me. But he didn't') and Alabama ('I know it's Alabama and they got six first-rounders. Well I'm a first-rounder in my mind. You've gotta be a little psychotic, you know what I mean?')
But Pavia is, in one scene, dinged by one of his teammates. During a film session, an unidentified teammate playfully — maybe — tells him: 'You don't do s— at practice. You sit and practice and run around and talk s—.' When Pavia asks about run plays, the teammate says: 'Those are fake rushes. We don't use those in the game.'
In another episode, Texas A&M and Mississippi State are featured leading into rivalry games against Texas and Ole Miss. Both games go the wrong way for the team Netflix featured. That's a theme: This is not a series meant to highlight just the winners. It's also a byproduct of the winning teams not participating, another reason some of the season's biggest games — Georgia-Texas, Georgia-Alabama — are not in the series.
'You never get everyone in the first season,' Martin said. 'For whatever reason, some people just want to see what it's going to look like. Some people feel like, 'hey, listen, I might win this thing this year, and I don't want any distractions.' And we fully respect anyone's decision to be in it or not.'
Yes, Martin said 'first season.' And if it returns for a second, it would likely be the SEC. That makes the response to the series intriguing: Does the series do so well that Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Ole Miss and Missouri feel like they missed out? Another season, and a shot at more programs, would produce even more compelling stories.
'Hopefully we'll get to do some more,' Martin said. 'You've got to find an audience for it. But I think the audience will be there.'
(Top photo of Napier: James Gilbert / Getty Images for ONIT)