Oklahoma Football: Baker Mayfield rocks hilarious new ads

Oklahoma football‘s former starting quarterback Baker Mayfield may not be the brightest light in the marquee, but his new ads for underwear made me laugh.

When college players move on to the NFL, a great deal of their income comes from endorsement deals. Madison Avenue does a great job of padding the pockets of ridiculously overpaid professional football players.

Quarterbacks, in particular, seem to be the golden boys for the ad agencies—in the last decade, quarterbacks have landed some of the most lucrative ad agency contracts, with four out of five of the highest contracts being awarded to signal-callers.  Peyton Manning has been the most successful so far, with contracts to DirecTV, Nike, and Buick, among others.

Former Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield is destined to follow in the grand tradition of massive endorsement deals—except one of his deals is unintentionally hilarious. Baker Mayfield has his own signature line of briefs made by underwear sellers PSD. The rest of the line is cheesy, but if wolf-themed briefs are your thing, more power to you. And if you want to wear Oklahoma briefs on your nether region, sure. Go for it.

I could be misreading the situation; it’s possible that the makers of the Mayfield ads were being intentionally ironic. But honestly, these ads look like the intro to a bad seventies retrospective. Mayfield is shown furiously flexing his abs in an industrial park with a Rolls Royce and a freaking tiger. Because that’s super normal.

I can picture the conversation between the idiots who created the ad: “Dude, you know when you need to take your pet tiger for a spin in the Rolls and you just don’t have time to put on a shirt?”

“Totally, bro. Oh–and while we’re at it, we’ll stop by this post-apocalyptic looking industrial park and chill for a second so I can flex my abs.”

“Bro, this is going to be epic.” *sounds of author retching*

Is that the demographic that they’re going for? Random muscleheads with money and endangered pets? I can’t imagine that message would sell many pairs of these undies, because that particular buyer persona is probably limited to some internet gazillionaire in Hong Kong.

Fox Sports is all up in arms about the ad. I just think it’s hysterical. Look, the kid is young and is now making more money in one day than some folks make in a year. If he gets his jollies from smarmy underwear ads, let him. We can all console ourselves with the thought that one day he will have children and his kids will get tortured on the playground with these goofy pictures.