Super Bowl-winning QB and tech reps all chasing same goal: Pop-A-Shot national glory

New York Times

4 days ago

Brad Johnson stumbled across a broadcast of the Pop-A-Shot National Championship last year. Watching his favorite basketball arcade game on a big stage felt like two quarters dropping into the coin slot of his heart.
With each rhythmic, rapid-fire shot, the former NFL quarterback felt a renewed desire to reach the zenith of sport again.
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You know, like the time he won Super Bowl XXXVII.
Friday night, Johnson will be one of eight competitors participating in this year's Pop-A-Shot National Championship in Orlando. He competed in a regional qualifier in May in St. Louis and finished with the third-highest score of the event by three points (Michael Pashkow of Berkeley Heights, N.J., won the qualifier) but was awarded a wild-card invitation to the national tournament.
All of the competitors look to dethrone last year's champion, Josh Caputo of Montgomery, Ill. The event will be televised on ESPN2.
'This is like 'Top Gun,' the best of the best,' said Johnson, who quarterbacked the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl win against the Oakland Raiders in 2003. 'These (Pop-A-Shot) guys, I know they're training like no other to do this.'
After buying a Pop-A-Shot machine for his home in January, Johnson began shooting as many as 1,700 shots a day. He has now wound up at the precipice of yet another epic feat.
Brad Johnson, who quarterbacked a Super Bowl winner, will vie for the Pop-A-Shot National Championship on Friday night. He sent this video to show he's ready. @TheRealPopAShot #BigBadBrad pic.twitter.com/KqmgkQAokX
— Daniel Brown (@BrownieAthletic) July 31, 2025
Before he was an NFL quarterback, Johnson was an all-state basketball star at Owen High School in Black Mountain, N.C. He also was a two-sport college athlete at Florida State, playing sparingly over 56 games for the Seminoles' basketball team in the late '80s and shooting 51.8 percent from the field.
Johnson, 56, will be the oldest competitor in the field. He is also the only former two-time Pro Bowl selection in a field comprised mostly of early-40s professionals with occupations ranging from technology services supervisor to automotive parts buyer to field service technician.
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And then there's Jarrod Shappell, a 41-year-old San Francisco-based business consultant who tuned up for the national championship by repeatedly smoking Golden State Warriors guard Brandin Podziemski in practice rounds earlier this week (more on that later).
Johnson qualifies as an underdog given his wild-card status and his lack of tournament experience. Then again, the quarterback who also played for Minnesota, Washington and Dallas during his 15-year NFL career began training long before the other competitors.
'I'm an '80s kind of guy — all the music and video games, and especially the arcade,' Johnson said. 'At every bowling alley, at every arcade, there was a Pop-A-Shot, and I've just always enjoyed it. Every sports bar, I found a challenge and tried to play somebody or tried to put up the high score.'
In jumping into this world, Johnson has joined an unusual tribe. Shot-poppers make for a cultish following.
Where would they rank in terms of zealous devotion?
'It's, like, K-Pop and Pop-A-Shot. It feels like that type of subculture,' Shappell said. 'But it's also, like, the funnest, most joy-filled group of people.'
A Warriors season-ticket holder qualified for the Pop-A-Shot National Championship this Friday, so the team arranged a tune-up match against Brandin Podziemski. That's @jarrodshappell in the blue jersey. 👀 pic.twitter.com/6rG1r509uR
— Daniel Brown (@BrownieAthletic) July 31, 2025
To answer the obvious question: Yes, really.
There is a fiercely competitive national championship for the addictive basketball arcade game born in 1981. A college coach named Ken Cochran invented Pop-A-Shot mainly to amuse the boys and girls attending his sports camps on the Kansas Wesleyan University campus.
The coach's prototype quickly evolved into a machine featuring a lone basket with a 14-inch rim and a seven-inch ball. (Standard rims are 18 inches, and men's basketballs are nine inches in circumference.) Donnie Frye, a local welder, helped Cochran design the frame. Pete Sias, an engineer in Salina, Kan., designed the electronics.
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In Pop-A-Shot, the basketballs automatically roll back to the shooter. The key to success is firing as many shots as possible without hesitation.
The player with the highest score wins, but that's not necessarily the shooter with the most makes. The shots vary in value based on timing. In the latest version, the Pop-A-Shot Elite released in February, made shots can count as two points or three points depending on the shot clock. In the national tournament, rounds last 55 seconds.
Cochran sold his Pop-A-Shot business to a Silicon Valley executive in 2016. Tony Stucker was living in San Mateo, Calif., and burned out working for several tech startups when he began looking online for a business he could buy. His search turned up Pop-A-Shot, there for the taking.
'(Cochran) had been trying to sell the company for over a year before I even found it,'' Stucker said in a phone interview. 'Different people had kicked the tires, but the business really hadn't done much throughout the decade.'
At that time, sales had slowed to roughly 300 units per year. There was no advertising. Competitors were dominating because they were on Amazon, and Pop-A-Shot hadn't bothered.
'A lot of the companies just wanted to buy it and take the name and throw everything else aside,'' Stucker said. 'I was like, 'No, I really want to focus on the legacy and build this back up.' I think (Cochran) appreciated that. We became very close.'
Cochran died in 2017, a month shy of his 85th birthday, but his wish came true. Stucker guided Pop-A-Shot into the online market, and the company engineered licensing deals with several dozen NCAA teams.
Stucker said several NBA players, including Dallas Mavericks guard D'Angelo Russell and Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker, have the home game. He gets a kick out of the Miami Marlins baseball team having a Pop-A-Shot Elite in its clubhouse; the barcode scan on the machines keeps track of the players' scores.
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'We see how much they play, and they've got some good players,'' Stucker said. 'Maybe they're not having a great year on the field, but they've got some good Pop-A-Shot players.'
Above all, Stucker revived the Pop-A-Shot National Championship, which had been dormant for 25 years. After last year's hastily organized event, Stucker helped orchestrate 2025 qualifying events across the country, starting during the fan fest at the NBA All-Star Game in San Francisco. There were other regional qualifiers, during the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, the NCAA Final Four in San Antonio and the WNBA All-Star Game in Indianapolis, among others.
'The level of play is much higher,'' Stucker said. 'At our most recent qualifier in Vegas, there were a bunch of people just going back and forth with the high score. A lot of times, it came down to whether they missed two shots or three shots. It was just that simple.'
There isn't a large money prize, but there is a trophy and a championship-style belt for the winner. Pop-A-Shot does pay for the finalists' airfare and accommodations.
'That's what they win,'' Stucker said. 'They win all-expense paid trips.'
About that disputed wild-card entry …
Sure, Johnson is a former NFL player as well as an accomplished trick-shot star with an unusual Instagram account. But none of that mattered — not even the Super Bowl ring — when he arrived at the St. Louis qualifier.
'They're there to win, and they want to beat me,'' Johnson said. 'There's no, 'Hey, good to meet you. I kept up with your career.' They want to beat you, and they want to beat you bad.
'It's true competition. It sounds crazy — it's a game of Pop-A-Shot, you know? But there, everybody's been putting in so much work. They've been doing this for years.'
To get to the qualifier, Johnson left his home in Athens, Ga., at 2 a.m. and made an 11-hour drive to St. Louis. Things wrapped up about 3 a.m., and he turned around and drove home.
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In between, Johnson put up 137 points in the preliminary action, a top score that held for most of the night. But in the first round of bracket play, the No. 3 seed, in the words of Stucker, 'kind of flamed out.' Pashkow eventually won the region and advanced.
Still, Johnson left enough of an impression that he also got a nod.
'To be honest, we just liked him so much and thought he was such a good player,'' Stucker said. 'So, we gave him a wild-card entry.'
From a marketing perspective, it's easy to see why Pop-A-Shot would want the draw of a noted NFL player. However, not everyone dug VIP treatment.
'I met some people in the community who were questioning Brad's credibility at the event,' Shappell said. 'But there are those videos — he scored very well on that machine — so I don't question that an NFL quarterback can compete.'
Johnson, meanwhile, appreciated the reality check: 'Honestly, I'd never been beaten in a Pop-A-Shot event. But I did get beat up in St. Louis. Like, it was shocking. It's humbling.'
Professional athletes don't have an advantage in this arena, not even the NBA guys. When the Warriors found out that Shappell — a season-ticket holder since 2013 — had advanced to the big dance, they arranged for a surprise perk.
They invited him on Tuesday to tune up on a pair of arcade basketball games (not, technically, Pop-A-Shot machines) at a Chase Center sports bar. They did not tell Shappell that Podziemski, a shooting guard who averaged 11.7 points last season while hitting 51 percent from the field, would join him.
It turned out to be a helpful session — for Podziemski. Shappell drubbed him 111-81 and 115-74 in two games before the Warriors guard skipped around just to study the real estate professional's form.
Shappell's key was balance. With a shoulder-width stance and shoulders square to the basket, there wasn't a trace of a bounce in Shappell's form. He just grabbed the next basketball without looking and tossed them toward the rim with a blank stare and a soft touch.
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'I think it's best when you feel like a machine doing its job and you're not thinking about it,'' Shappell said. 'You almost feel like you're cranking out widgets versus actually shooting the basketball.'
Indeed, a final game between the two tightened up before Shappell pulled away for a 118-101 victory.
'Every round I was there, I just learned little things,'' Podziemski said. 'How to shoot it. How to grab the ball. How to get as many (shots) up as I can.'
Shappell honed his skills the old-fashioned way, celebrating his 40th birthday two years ago by traveling around town with a mission.
'We went to every San Francisco bar that had a Pop-A-Shot, and I stayed and broke the record before I went home,'' he said. 'I think it was seven bars. It was, perhaps, not what my friends had in mind to celebrate.'
Now, it's Johnson's turn to step into the madness. During his Super Bowl triumph, he completed 18 of 34 passes for 215 yards, two touchdown passes and an interception.
Not bad, but he knows he'll need to be way more accurate on Friday to add to his trophy case.
'None of us can run up and down the court anymore at our age,'' Johnson joked. 'It's just a fun event to be a part of.'