Resting in the long eight-month period between the conclusion of the College Football Playoff championship game and the kickoff of the season openers is an ambiguous time of year when bored football players take to social media and post videos of themselves doing things.
We're focusing on the best of the trick-shot videos with these 2015 college-football-offseason-viral-video power rankings:
Falling under the gratuitous "look-at-me" culture that percolates the college football recruiting scene is this grandiose hype-video announcement by a high schooler in Florida. Still, the school bus does weigh 16,000 pounds, so it's a tremendous show of strength.
Checking in at 6-foot-7 and 410 pounds, LaQuan McGowan is one of the biggest players in college football. As an added bonus, McGowan plays tight end. He is the create-a-player video game function gone mad, and it's glorious.
So, watch a 400-pound tight end-to-be catching one-handed passes? Yes, and please.
Texas' Nick Rose one-upped Baylor's Spencer Evans, who one-upped Eddy Pineiro, an Alabama commit. After Pineiro posted to social media a video of himself kicking a 73-yard field goal, more established kickers went to social media to show the youngster what's up. Less than two weeks after Pineiro's post, Evans topped him with a 75-yard field goal. That spurned Rose into action. Rose -- who had already made a name for himself with a backflip field goal (more on that later) -- went 80-burger with his kick, doing Evans' kick five yards better.
Utah kicker Andy Phillipswasn't down with all of the social-media videos that show off leg strength. Still, Phillips went the social-media route to post a video of a spinning football field-goal trick, which he did in full pads.
Georgia Southern kicker Younghoe Koo did Phillips' spinning ball trick one better with a spinning-ball field-goal kick followed by a backflip. If a kicker could do a field-goal kick and backflip in one motion in an actual game, now that would really be something.
Rafael Gaglianone endeared himself to an entire nation of sports fans when he celebrated a 51-yard field goal with a neat little samba. During his summer vacation, Gaglianone took to the practice field and did a field goal kick from a holder's nose. Thankfully for everybody paying attention to this type of stuff, the kick holder tricks didn't stop there.
Not even 24 hours after Gaglianone's kick-from-nose field goal went viral, another kicker one-upped him. Arkansas State's Luke Ferguson kicked a field goal off his holder's tongue. Thankfully, this was where the holder trick-shot videos ended.
North Carolina A&T State running back Tarik Cohen became a social-media star in late May. That was when he posted videos of feats showing off his freakish athleticism into the social space. First with one football, and then with two.
A month before booting an 80-yard field goal and posting said event to social media, Texas kicker Nick Rose performed an even more impressive act of athleticism. When this video of Rose kicking a field goal through the uprights while midway through a backflip was posted, the World Wide Web went nuts. June is a magical time of year in the world of football.
We will never forget the great "long-snapper wars" of the summer of 2015.
(And by "will never forget" we mean "most likely be unable to recall once the season kicks off".)
Like all great wars, we need to break it down in the form of a trilogy, a la "Star Wars."
Snapper Wars -- Episode 1: A New Snap. The "long-snapper wars" of 2015 start in epic fashion when Buffalo's Corbin Grassman and his steel-nerved sidekick put on a daring display of long snapping. The adventure continued inside the stadium with a snap from grandstand's third deck into an awaiting garbage can on the field. The snap is strong with this one.
Snapper Wars -- Episode 2: The Hilltopper Strikes Back. The saga moved to the state of Kentucky, where WKU's Nolan Dowling showed that the possibility of successfully navigating a long snap from inside a stadium suite and into a trash can on the field is approximately 200 to 1.
Snapper Wars -- Episode 3: Return of the Bear. Baylor's Jimmy Landes showed that executing a long snap from a stadium's roof and into a garbage can are not just delusions of grandeur.
Follow Jim Reineking on Twitter @jimreineking.
