The Comedians of NFL YouTube: Tom Grossi, Brandon Perna, and the Art of Loving a Team Out Loud

Tom Grossi and Brandon Perna are two of the most prominent comedy-first NFL creators on YouTube — Grossi covering the Packers since 2015, Perna covering the Broncos and the wider NFL since 2013 as ThatsGoodSports. They also co-host GPS, the Grossi Perna Show, together three mornings a week.

Two guys, similar size audiences, same lane — from the outside it reads as a competition. Grossi's the Packers guy. Perna's the Broncos guy. Somebody must be winning.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 11 a.m. Eastern, the two of them go live together and talk about football for an hour. The show is called GPS — the Grossi Perna Show — and it's been running for years. Their own description of it is that they were sent to earth by the football gods to navigate you through a very long football season, which tells you roughly everything about the tone.

NFL comedy YouTube is a scene.

The teacher who made a video as therapy

Tom Grossi grew up in New York, which is the wrong place to become a Packers fan. His dad was a Cowboys fan — survivable for an adult, unbearable for a six-year-old whose classmates had opinions. When he heard at school that Green Bay had taken the Cowboys apart, he went home and informed his father he'd switched teams.

He taught high school history for six years, grades nine through twelve. Then, in early 2015, the Packers lost a playoff game in the specific way that ruins a week, and Grossi made a reaction video about it. Not as a career move — as therapy. He didn't know how to edit. He didn't know how to make videos.

It went viral. Packers fans wrote to him to say it had made them feel better.

What followed is the least glamorous origin story in football media: a folding table in a basement, a lighting rig built out of PVC pipe, and a podcast called Packast where he interviewed fans of the opposing team. It took nearly six years to reach a hundred thousand subscribers. Six. He was teaching the whole time.

The channel that grew out of that table now covers the entire NFL, six days a week in season, with every Packers and primetime game streamed live. It also spawned something genuinely strange and wonderful: Coach, a scripted series that expanded into an interconnected universe of roughly forty characters, all played by Grossi. A former history teacher built a cinematic universe in his house because the offseason is long.

And then there's the part that makes the rest of it look small. Since 2021 he's raised over two million dollars for charity — including a run at all thirty NFL stadiums in thirty days that brought in more than half a million for St. Jude. In 2023 the league named him NFL Fan of the Year. He describes what he's doing on his own channel as trying to do chaotic good, which is the best three-word summary of a career anyone has managed lately.

The professional who turned the camera around

Brandon Perna came at it from the opposite direction entirely.

While Grossi was learning to edit from scratch, Perna had already spent years inside YouTube's machinery. He worked at Maker Studios during the platform's Broadcast Yourself era, helping build some of its earliest hit shows — the kind of résumé that existed before anyone thought sports and YouTube belonged in the same sentence. A Denver native working in Los Angeles, he kept following the Broncos from a distance.

Then Bleacher Report offered him a job. He turned it down — the move, the hours — but the offer clarified something. As he later put it, he thought sports and comedy was maybe where he could do something.

So he turned the camera around. The channel started in 2012, found its focus in 2013, and caught the Peyton Manning wave at exactly the right moment: a recap of Manning's seven-touchdown opener against Baltimore opened the floodgates.

The best artifact from that era is the origins page he wrote for his own site, which explains that ThatsGoodSports was created, like many things, to make him extremely rich, that in this respect he had failed miserably, and that he'd learned nothing fulfilled him more than talking about football. He describes the goal as covering the NFL and the Broncos in great detail where facts take a back seat to a crappy joke. He notes the operation is still shooting in a basement, and that he hopes one day to be able to use the word "we."

He got the "we." The channel went from Broncos-only to the whole league, added a second channel for Broncos-specific coverage, and moved into longform video and mini-documentaries — the rise-and-fall histories that pull hundreds of thousands of views from people who don't even follow the teams involved. Somebody once described the show as SportsCenter eating Weekend Update and regurgitating a football show for the internet, which is unkind and completely accurate.

The art of loving a team out loud

Put the two origin stories side by side and the shared thing becomes obvious.

Neither of them is doing analysis with jokes on top. Both of them are doing fandom — the actual experience of caring too much about a football team — and comedy is simply the honest register for that. Hope, dread, irrational optimism in July, and the specific misery of a playoff loss are funny, because they're absurd, because caring this much about grown men and a leather ball is absurd, and the only two options are to pretend otherwise or to lean all the way in.

They lean in.

It's also why the audience is so loyal. A national desk covers your team as one of thirty-two obligations. Grossi and Perna cover their teams the way you do — personally, unreasonably, with the volume up. Grossi's viewers watch him grieve Packers losses in real time. Perna's watch a guy who has been mad about the Broncos since childhood and has simply gotten better equipment.

And the reason they can share a show three mornings a week is that neither one's appeal was ever "better takes than the other guy." Grossi's Packers fandom and Perna's Broncos fandom don't compete for the same territory; they rhyme. Two people doing the same emotionally honest thing about different teams have far more in common than either has with anyone doing it dishonestly.

Where to start

Three doors in, depending on what you're after:

• GPS, if you want the thesis of this article in one sitting. Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, both of them, the whole league.
• Grossi's Packers coverage if you want to see what devotion looks like at full volume — or the Coach universe if you want to see what a person does with an offseason and no supervision.
• Perna's longform documentaries if you want the comedy pointed at history: the rises, the collapses, the franchises that lost their minds in slow motion.

What they built

There's a version of football media where every voice sounds like a panel show, and there's the version these two built, where it sounds like a person. The second one turned out to be what an enormous number of fans actually wanted — and it produced, along the way, two million dollars for children's hospitals and a Fan of the Year award, which is not a normal outcome for people who started out making jokes in a basement.

Find Tom Grossi on YouTube, Brandon Perna at ThatsGoodSports, and both of them on GPS.

---

A note from our corner of the football calendar: creators like these are the reason the offseason is survivable, and schedule release day in May is one of their biggest content holidays of the year — the moment every fan finds out exactly how their next nine months are going to feel. If you'd like to try calling that slate before the league announces it, our mock schedule builder enforces the real rules the NFL works under.

MockSlate is an independent fan tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the National Football League or any NFL team. Team names are used for identification purposes only.