The Mystery of the 'Coach' YouTube Channel

"Sometimes a mystery is no mystery at all" Columbo (Maybe)

(This is mostly satire, I don't know anything about the person behind the @CoachOffficial YouTube Channel other than that it exists.)

There are any number of curious items to be found on God's own internet. Many of those items can be found on YouTube. For example, did you know that the late television series Coach, which aired on ABC for 8 seasons, ending in 1997, now has an 'official' YouTube channel? I bet you didn't know that. Heck, I bet that star Craig T. Nelson and the executives at Disney, proud owners of ABC and by extension, Coach, have no idea that there is an 'Official' Coach YouTube channel.

I'm putting the word 'official' in quotes because the lack of Disney branding seems to indicate that this is not, in fact, an official channel for this long dead television series. That, plus the fact that the channel claims Jolly ol' England as its home, seems to indicate that this channel is, at the very least, an anomaly in the history of the long forgotten, hardly mourned college football comedy, Coach. So perplexed at the existence of this Coach YouTube account, I had to sit down and look at it and purge it from my consciousness on this page, in this very article.

Despite my obvious snarkiness, I actually grew up watching and enjoying Coach. Craig T. Nelson was never a natural comedian. Rather, he was a perfect straight man, an ideal stalwart in a sea of weirdos. Actors Jerry Van Dyke, brother of Dick Van Dyke, and future Spongebob Squarepants Starfish star, Bill Fagerbakke, would bring him their weirdness and he would react like a normal person who was slowly being driven insane by the bizarre foibles of the people around him. In his personal life he had a strained romantic relationship with Christine (Shelly Fabares), a local news personality. It's a relationship that is fraught with the kind of believable and relatable personality conflicts you might imagine a Boomer like Coach would have.

And that's Coach. Throw in the occasional note about College Football and you have a sturdy comic premise for a mostly banal and occasionally sublime television comedy. There is nothing truly special about Coach, no reason for it to be remembered. Craig T. Nelson did win an Emmy for his performance but the show was far from a critical darling and it was narrowly a demographic win for ABC in blocks of other successful sitcom hours with shows like Roseanne. So, why did someone randomly start an 'official' Coach YouTube channel 26 after the show left the air?

The content of this channel, @CoachOfficial, offers few clues. The channel launched in September of 2022 and has since posted 12 clips from the show, each ranging about 7 minutes in length. These are merely random snatches of episodes of a relatively low quality. The videos look as if they were ripped from old VHS tapes, further speaking to the unofficial nature of this official YouTube page. So, in 8 months, a random person has taken chunks of a mostly forgotten TV show, proclaimed their channel the 'Official' channel of this show, and posted clips of the show on YouTube less than twice a month.

And somehow, 850 people have decided to subscribe to this channel. Yes, inexplicably, this channel has grown to 850 subscribers in its meager 8 month existence. I feel like I am documenting a weird ARG of some kind. I keep wondering if at some point I am going to watch a clip and find a clue that will lead down some bizarre rabbit hole that might explain why someone would dedicate any of their time to uploading clips of a deeply forgettable 90s sitcom on YouTube and why 850 strangers saw this and decided they needed to know each time this channel posted a new clip from this TV show.

From the about section of @CoachOfficial "Craig T. Nelson won an Emmy for his hilarious portrayal of a University football coach struggling to keep his outrageous personal life under control. Comedy legend Jerry Van Dyke shines as his sometimes dim - but always hysterical - assistant coach. Classic comedy doesn't get any better than this!" This could have been taken directly from the back of a dusty VHS cover. It's certainly not something that anyone who wasn't part of the Coach marketing team in 1993 would have written. But why? Why did someone type out a blurb about Coach?

I feel as if I am going insane. My grip on sanity is loosening, what is the inner life of someone this dedicated to the television series Coach like? Why Coach? It boggles the mind. Who are you @Coach Official? What drives you? Do you have a job and a family? Does your family also have a strange affinity for the television series Coach? In my head canon this is a man, perhaps in his 60s, distant from his wife and children, desperately combing through clips of Coach to convert from old VHS tapes to videos he can post on YouTube.

He holds down a job as a janitor at a college but this is only to fund his addiction to becoming the ultimate Coach super-fan. He carries pictures of the cast in his wallet instead of pictures of his kids and grandkids. He has a signed photo of Craig T. Nelson that he keeps on top of a stack of Coach VHS tapes next to his ancient but still functioning VCR. This man has a son who he hasn't spoken to in years since the son refused to continue converting season 7 of Coach to usable online video files. This forced @CoachOfficial to have to learn how to convert VHS himself, further isolating him from his wife of 40 years who has drifted off into alcoholism to cope with her husband's inattention.

That's not to mention how he squandered their meager income and retirement savings on Coach memorabilia that is really only valuable to him. As you can imagine, there isn't a very big market for Coach memorabilia. Things such as Coach pennants, signed photos of Jerry Van Dyke and Shelly Fabares, and mock Minnesota State Screaming Eagles jerseys simply don't hold much appeal beyond this one man. The market is, in fact, made up entirely of the man behind the @CoachOfficial YouTube channel.

Then there was the Claire Carey incident. The actress had to take out a restraining order against @CoachOfficial after he tried following her home to get her to sign one of his many cast photos. She'd already signed more than a dozen for him but had drawn the line at signing his season 6 exclusive, behind the scenes photo that appeared to have been taken in secret from somewhere inside her dressing room. The actress who portrayed Coach's daughter, Kelly, was more than a little taken aback by the photo which showed her removing her makeup in the mirror and trying to ignore Shelly Fabares.

Sure, Jerry Van Dyke had still decided to sign it, despite it's bizarre angle, unknown origin, and the fact that he isn't in the picture, but that's just Jerry, an affable doofus on screen and off. Jerry may be the lesser known brother of a beloved national treasure in Dick Van Dyke, but he's also an elderly gentleman eager for any kind of fan interaction, even one as creepily dedicated and odd as the one he'd had with @CoachOfficial. So affable is Jerry, he'd actually gone to dinner at the man's home and endured telling hours of Coach stories while @CoachOfficial rocked back and forth enthralled by being in the presence of a Coach castmember.

It's a deep dark rabbit hole that enveloped me as I began my, admittedly, made up journey into the inner-life of a man who created a Coach themed YouTube channel, but it was, at the very least, more entertaining than a typical episode of Coach. I didn't even get into the time @CoachOfficial cornered Craig T. Nelson in a Wal Mart grocery aisle and drilled him with questions about what being a College Football Coach on a television show was really like. That incident was more awkward and uncomfortable than creepy, but I digress.

Why does this exist? Why is this bizarre YouTube channel something that exists? What drives someone to want to document the series Coach by sharing random portions of episodes out of the context of said episode? We may never know the answers to these questions. That's mostly because it could not matter less in any possible way. Much as there really is no need for this YouTube channel to exist, there is no need for a writer like myself to be so thoroughly, bizarrely obsessed with its existence. Why, I've begun neglecting my own family as I have fallen into this obsession. What if my wife is becoming an alcoholic? What if I fallout with my son over this obsession! Dear God, what have I done!

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