Boom Goes The Dynamite! TRAINA: The 25 Must-See YouTube Sports Videos

By Luke Winn, SI.com

The subject of the most-viewed YouTube sports clip of all-time, in a rather boring revelation, is the world's most-popular sport. The video is entitled Comedy Football. It's a montage of soccer bloopers set to Malcolm Arnold's The River Kwai March, and it has been watched 16.8 million times since it was posted on March 5, 2007. The most highly played sports clip that originated in the U.S. checks in at a respectable 9.1 million viewers; it's footage of an All-Star Weekend dance-off between Shaquille O'Neal, LeBron James and Dwight Howard.

If you're looking for signs that YouTube -- which has grown into an 83.4 million-video giant in just its third year of existence -- has changed the sporting world, these are not it. Both are exactly the kind of light fodder that might have appeared on stadium scoreboards during downtime in the 1980s or '90s. Our favorite sports clips, for some reason, are the ones that make us laugh, and our next-favorite sports clips, on YouTube's most-viewed list, are highlight reels, including the ball-skills of Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho and the dunks of the NBA's Vince Carter. On a macro level, sports fans' viewing mediums may have changed, but our viewing preferences have not.

The real impact of YouTube on the sporting world lies in its ability to distribute a breadth of content to a massive audience. It's estimated that the bandwidth on YouTube in 2007 exceeded that of the whole Internet in 2000, and not only are sports fans there being wowed by highlights of international soccer stars, they're also raving over pixelated tape of a high-school freshman on a football field in Florida. Not only are they watching NBA All-Stars clown around in Las Vegas, they're also being exposed to the comedic stylings of a D-Leaguer in Bismarck, N.D. They're not only being served commentary from pundits on ESPN and Clear Channel; they're also getting opinions from a basement in Bluegrass Country. Programming is less likely to be digitally encoded by major networks than it is by dedicated bloggers. And video of a wild controversy can go viral not just when it's from the World Series, but also a prep state-title game on local-access cable in Georgia. In each of these lesser-known instances, the individuals involved are impacted by the power of Internet video. For better or worse, YouTube changed their lives.

The YouTube Recruiting Sensation (the story of Noel Devine)

For the past seven years, Derek Williams has run Sunshine Preps, an online service out of St. Leo, Fla., that offers footage of Florida's high-school prospects to an audience of college coaches. Williams has no real interest in viral video, but he is also the producer of the most-watched high-school football highlight tape of all-time: that of the boy wonder of the Internet Recruiting Era, Noel Devine.

In the spring of 2004, Williams was poring over game tapes of North Fort Myers High's '03 season when he saw a blazing-fast player -- whose number wasn't on the roster sheet Williams had -- make a series of stunning cutbacks, 360s, and breakaway runs. "I asked the coach [James Iandoli], 'Who the hell is this No. 7?

"Is he a senior?'" Williams asked.

"[Iandoli] said, 'No, that kid is a freshman.' And at that point I was really blown away."

Williams posted a compilation of the then 15-year-old Devine's freshman-year highlights, plus photos of him bench-pressing 315 pounds on SunshinePreps' site. It spread like wildfire on message boards. At one point it crashed SunshinePreps' server. Then it hit YouTube. That video, combined with subsequent montages from Devine's sophomore, junior and senior seasons, have been viewed nearly four million times. On the most popular clip, from Devine's junior year, the uploader offers the comment, "This guy is too insane, (sic) either he's playing against retards or he is the next LaDanian Tomlinson or Reggie Bush."

Williams is less crude with his assessment. "Noel Devine," he says, "set the standard for the high-school highlight tape."

Devine, who's now a sophomore at West Virginia, reached household-name status at a very early stage in the football world. His legend transcended the world of recruitniks and reached regular fans; as a result, the circumstances of his personal life -- both of his parents died of AIDS while he was young, and he has fathered two children -- were made public. That, in the end, was Williams' regret. Devine, though, never had any problem with the videos. He says sometimes he'll go onto YouTube from his computer at college, and look at those high-school clips, "just to reminisce. Sometimes I can't believe some of the stuff I did."

As a freshman in 2007, Devine was stuck behind Steve Slaton on the depth chart, and ran for 627 yards on 73 carries, for an astounding 8.3 yards per rush. Devine is considered a dark horse for the Heisman this year. "I'm just trying to keep moving forward," he says. "I want to get farther than being a legend on YouTube."

If Devine does go from second-string to Heisman in a year's time, no one will be able to say he came out of nowhere. It'll merely be the second phase of the sensation.