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Josh Snead was sitting in his cubicle at Oakstone Medical Publishing in Birmingham, Ala., trudging through yet another endless shift; he hated most days at his sales job. And this was after moving from his uninspiring video editing job at the same company.

“You know all the disgusting things you see on social media? Where everyone says, ‘Look how gross this is?’ That was our job every day,” Snead said. “Sitting in the dark and editing emergency room medical lectures all day.”

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To break up the monotony, Snead, colleague Robert Clay and a few other coworkers would leave the office around 3 p.m. each day for an ice cream cone at a nearby Dairy Queen before returning to their dark editing bays to finish the workday.

“We all gained 40-50 pounds. By the end, we were wearing flip-flops and cargo shorts to work,” Snead said. “It was a very sad time.”

Until one day in the fall of 2014, when a coworker poked his head into Snead’s cubicle.

“Hey, Paul Finebaum is looking for you!” he said.

Excited and slightly confused, Snead pieced together that a video he and Clay had shot a few days earlier about the Alabama quarterback competition had aired on the show’s SEC Network simulcast.

Finebaum and his producers, Mark Kubiak and John Hayes, were hunting for the creators to congratulate them on a job well done and talk about the video on-air.

Earlier that month, the show had put out a call for fan rants.

“It was mostly cellphone video. But these guys put production quality into it, which was so different from what we’d seen,” Kubiak said. “They were really funny and timely. We got that coming in and we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’”

Snead, who starred in the video, connected with Finebaum’s producers and agreed to do a radio interview that afternoon. Clay, then working on a documentary team at the University of Alabama, pulled over on the side of the road to record his partner’s Finebaum debut.

“It was a big deal,” Clay said.

“I told as many people as I could in the five minutes before them asking me if I could call in and me actually calling in,” Snead said.

Seven years later, Clay and Snead are the two principal halves of “SEC Shorts,” where creating funny, topical college football videos is now their full-time job.

Between their YouTube and Facebook accounts, their videos during the season routinely clear 1 million combined views. That number is only climbing, and so is their follower count, now beyond 300,000 on the platforms. They also have a weekly spot on the Saturday pregame show “SEC Nation” on SEC Network.

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This weekend, they’ll host their first live show, featuring live and recorded skits, audience games and standup comedy all targeted toward a paid audience of Georgia fans at the Morton Theatre in Athens.

Clay grew up an Auburn fan amid a family of Auburn fans and attended Auburn before film school. He was even in the marching band, and he can still call upon the smell of the balloon filled with pee that pelted his uniform to prove it.

“You’re quite the target in that white uniform,” Clay said.

Snead, meanwhile, was born in Alabama but moved to California and Texas before returning to his home state for high school.

Family members jockeying for his Iron Bowl allegiance gifted him Alabama and Auburn shirts. He wore both to school until his basketball coach put a stop to it.

“People kept telling me, ‘You can’t do that.’ I’d say, ‘No, these are free shirts. I’m going to wear them,’” Snead said.

His coach demanded he pick a team. That year, Alabama won the national title, so Snead went with the Crimson Tide. Then Snead attended the University of Montevallo, where the main event for homecoming is a pair of competing musicals put on by the student body.

“Josh is your stereotypical Alabama fan,” Clay jokes.

He does fit the profile, even if his love and intentions are pure: no degree from the university – a literal T-shirt fan, as they’re often called by diehards – tenuous family ties and an allegiance with an origin closely tied to the program’s success. Still, Snead has let his Tide flag fly for more than a decade now as he learned what makes SEC fans tick.

After Gene Chizik in 2010 captured Auburn’s first national title since 1957, Clay and Snead teamed up for a video in which Snead shouted messages of encouragement to then-Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs that replaced the audio of Jacobs’ legendary heckler in the wake of the Chizik’s hiring. (Yes, they know it ultimately aged poorly.)

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A couple of years later, they made a video replaying the iconic “Kick Six” from the perspective of an Alabama radio announcer unaware that field goals could be returned.

As the SEC Network debuted in the weeks leading up to the 2014 season, both Snead and Clay began to imagine a future there. When Finebaum put out his call for fan submissions, they hoped their video might lead to a career shift at the new fixture for SEC fans.

After Snead’s debut on Finebaum, they met with Kubiak and Hayes to discuss a potential deal. Snead and Clay agreed to produce a video a week that would be aired on the show.

“That year, as long as I watched it, we were putting anything on there,” Kubiak said. “But I think their dry sense of humor and the production quality made them stand apart. We’d run them over and over throughout the week because they were so good.”

But they had no pay, no budget and limited availability as they worked full-time jobs alongside their responsibilities with Finebaum. They shot the videos on DSLR cameras, usually with Clay filming and Snead starring, acting out a script they teamed up to write about what had happened in the state of Alabama that week.

After the season, they quit their jobs and linked up with AL.com, where they produced a weekly sponsored clip, and their popularity grew. They also began shooting videos centered around teams other than their own.

“It was a challenge. You know about the teams, but you’re not as comfortable or knowledgeable as your own team. It was like learning a foreign language,” Clay said. “Each team is its own thing. How A&M fans respond to things is different than Florida fans. (We were) learning how they talk to each other and what they respond to.”

After a few seasons under the AL.com banner, Clay and Snead wondered if they could do more on their own and without oversight from a parent company. They elected to bet on themselves. They would have more control over content and resources – but they wouldn’t have salaries.

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Clay went to dinner with his parents and broke the news: He was quitting his job and saying goodbye to his salary and 401K to make internet videos. His mom was devastated.

“What is wrong with you?’” she asked.

Snead told his parents, who landed on a different reaction.

“My dad was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, great, can I be in one of these? I’ve got five or six ideas I want to run by you,’” Snead said.

Within two weeks, Clay and Snead had convinced their chief sponsor at AL.com to follow them in their independent endeavor. Suddenly, they were small business owners.

In the years since going independent, their productions have grown more elaborate. Their 2021 bowl dance video, a concept that has become a tradition to cap the regular season, featured around 30 people and took three days to film.

But their signature remains the Monday morning video that hits their channels by the time the work week begins. During Saturday game days, they’ll kick around ideas and have some feel for what that week’s sketch will be by the end of the most prominent games.

One of their most popular sketches of the 2021 season was a bruised, regretful Texas second-guessing its SEC membership after taking a beating from Arkansas.

In another, an angel and devil fight for Lane Kiffin’s soul on a crucial fourth-down decision after Kiffin’s aggressive approach backfired in an ugly loss to Alabama.

“It kind of writes itself in a lot of ways,” Clay said. “Those are the best when that happens.”

By Sunday, Clay will have a script for a sketch that runs three to four minutes, and Snead will begin chasing down the necessary props, locations and actors to turn the vision into on-screen reality.

When they’re not battling the elements or trying to make a video look more professional than their resources suggest, they can’t help but fight creeping self-doubt.

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“Halfway through, we’re usually like, ‘Does this suck? Is this stupid? Like, are we wasting our whole day?’” Snead said.

Added Clay: “We have established a precedent where people expect us to be funny. Is this joke funny? Is there a better way to do this? It’s stressful.”

Sunday means shooting for several hours, and when that’s done, Clay retreats into his editing bay as night turns into morning.

“Shoots are not super fun. People assume we’re laughing and having a good time, but because of the time crunch, it’s super serious. We don’t put out a lot of blooper videos because there aren’t any. It’s not, ‘Ha ha, great, try it again.’ It’s like, ‘Please learn your lines. We don’t have time for this,’” Snead said. “If someone messes up their lines, it gets weird. It’s not, ‘Oh, there’s one for the gag reel.’ It’s, ‘Please get this right. We have two hours.’”

By Monday, the video is published, and they get started on the next idea for that weekend’s edition of SEC Nation. Usually it’s a concept looking ahead to what the upcoming weekend may hold, but it does require the network to sign off on the script before filming.

Every fall for the past few seasons, that has been their routine.

“When there’s more people on set, it’s easier to realize, ‘Oh, yeah, what we’re doing is fun,’” Clay said. “If it’s the normal crew, we have it down to a science. Everyone has a job to do and executes it.”

As they’ve followed Nick Saban’s lead and trusted their process, their lives slowly have changed, too.

“The first time we were out together and Josh got recognized, I honestly thought he paid the guy to come do that in front of me,” Clay said.

Whether they’re at a sporting event, a supermarket in Colorado in the middle of a ski trip or around Birmingham, they’ve gone from anonymous grunts to college football celebrities.

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“When you put up a video, you don’t get people’s immediate reaction,” Snead said. “They leave comments and their views, but when someone actually comes up to you and says they were overseas and watched, it’s really cool to see people appreciate something you worked really hard to create.”

As they’ve created videos week after week, they’ve grown more and more adept at learning to read and speak the foreign languages of fan bases to which they don’t belong.

As for which ones are the best and worst at taking a joke? They hate that question. But they’ll answer it anyway.

“The best sense of humor is Tennessee fans,” Snead said. “We make fun of Tennessee half the season every year, and they all love it. They watch, share, and they’re in on the joke and cool with it. Auburn fans? We’ve had a couple videos like the Auburn Fansatol and Auburn roller coaster video. They love ones where you’re commiserating like, ‘Isn’t it crazy to be an Auburn fan?’ They’re cool with that. But if you’re like, ‘Hey, your offensive line isn’t so good,’ they’re like, ‘I’ll kill you and everyone you know.’”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos courtesy of SEC Shorts)

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