10 million views, 82 cameras, and $4 million: Inside the ‘f***ing awesome’ Internet Invitational

THE MOST PROLIFIC video editor in YouTube golf hasn’t slept in almost 40 hours. He can’t remember the last time he zoned out. If he affords himself the luxury of REM tonight — a real “if” — it is plausible, if not very likely, that he will dream about the blue glow of his computer screen.

Brendan Jones did not envision becoming his sport’s Jerry Bruckheimer or Mark Burnett. He didn’t plan to seize a directorial role in one of the most anticipated and well-financed tournaments in golf, or executive producer credits on one of the most innovative reality shows on TV. He never imagined he would be hailed as an internet visionary, or that more than 10 million people would watch his work in a single week. And he certainly didn’t plan for each of these feats to arrive in a single, entirely superhuman three-month effort.

What’s happened to Jones — and to his baby of these last three months, the Internet Invitational — is unthinkable. And if the circles underneath his eyes are any indication, it’s also exhausting.

All of it raises an interesting — and simple — question for Jones: Why? Why lose three months of his life to pre-production, production, and post-production; organizing a team of more than 75 people, 82 cameras and more than 28 terabytes of footage, more technological might than often joins a PGA Tour production? Why volunteer to spearhead the editing process, cultivating more than 800 hours of footage into six eminently digestible episodes, each sliced with a surgeon’s touch to perform within the all-knowing eye of the YouTube algorithm? And why believe himself capable of doing each of these things at once … without losing his mind?

Apparently the answer isn’t too complicated.

“Dave [Portnoy] was offering people $150,000 to replay a hole, and they were saying no!” Jones says, his voice still incredulous. “That’s not scripted. That’s not fake. That, right there, is f***ing awesome content.”

If you’ve watched even a minute of the Internet Invitational, the show that returned to YouTube for its second “season” last week, you’ve noticed it is different from any multimillion dollar golf tournament on TV.

The athletes are famous but not necessarily talented. The footage is glitzy but not particularly economical (episode one of season 2 ran more than five hours long). The style is intentionally contrived. The narrators are a smattering of Barstool celebrities with little golf experience … plus, interestingly, Kevin Kisner.

Unlike a “traditional” televised golf tournament, in which entertainment is a byproduct of many elite athletes pursuing athletic brilliance, the Internet Invitational wonders: What if we built the whole plane out of entertainment? The show is proudly two things at once: a golf tournament worth a cool $4 million and a reality TV show in which many of golf’s most vaguely familiar engage in a well-sodded recreation of Lord of the Flies.

“It’s all because of Dave, man,” Jones says. “Dave puts up all this money, and that changes people. That’s not good or bad — it just changes the way that people act, right? Dave’s big thing with anything that we do at Barstool, it’s like, what are the stakes? Why do people care? How are we going to get anything out of them?”

“Dave,” in this instance, is Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports who also acts as the master of ceremonies at the Internet Invitational. The whole tournament was his idea after another influencer golf tournament, the PGA Tour sanctioned “Creator Classic,” failed to include Barstool and flopped.

“Portnoy saw that and was like, ‘wait a second, why are my guys not in this?’” Sam “Riggs” Bozoian, who hosts Barstool’s Foreplay podcast, remembers. “The answer was, basically, your guys aren’t good enough at golf, and Dave was like, ‘Is entertainment golf really about who’s the best?’”

Portnoy, a Survivor diehard, wondered if the same internet-famous sticks who made the Creator Classic would consider joining hands with the sport’s more egalitarian influencers to form a new event. Then he wondered if they’d play along with the parts of his competition that weren’t so savory — near-constant filming, an outwardly opportunistic approach to controversy, and critically, the idea of surrendering name, image and likeness for a content series in which the competitors might not collect a paycheck.

Bozoian took the idea to Robby Berger, one of the faces behind the even-more-popular YouTube channel Bob Does Sports. He pitched the Internet Invitational as a low-stakes joint venture between the two accounts. Berger would wrangle the stars, an in return, his account would get publishing rights to episodes 1, 3 and 5 on YouTube, and all of the YouTube AdSense revenue that came from it. Bozoian and Portnoy would wrangle their side of the house, as well as the format, production, sponsorship and finances, and they would get publishing rights to episodes 2 and 4. (Season 2 is six episodes long, with the two partners publishing three episodes each.)

“We have a pretty simple way of handling the finances,” Bozoian says. “We get and raise as many sponsorship dollars as we possibly can, and then we subtract the production costs from that, and whatever’s left we put into the prize pool. So we’re not taking anything home.”

In the earliest days, the recipe list for the show ran four ingredients long. The first ingredient was stakes, and Barstool accomplished that goal by fronting a $1 million purse with help from sponsors like Dunkin’ Donuts. The second ingredient was star power — which was a bit of a tag-team effort between Barstool, which provided its stable of stars, and Berger, who leveraged his deep connections across the YouTube golf landscape to find the most interesting crop of competitors. The third ingredient was a golf resort big enough to host the tournament, house the players, and provide tee times on additional courses for those eliminated from competition but still hoping to make content. Big Cedar, in Missouri, was the very excited volunteer there. And the fourth — and most essential — was entertainment. Portnoy had that element figured out in spades.

“You can just see his mind churning,” Jones says. “Like, how am I gonna make this day, these two sessions better? We all think the golf’s gonna carry the video and the competition, but not Dave. He’s like, we can make this better — and then he does.”

The first episode of the Internet Invitational came out last fall, and almost immediately Jones and Bozoian knew they’d found something unusual. In episode 1, a prominent storyline centered around a YouTuber and former pro who slept through his alarm, putting his side of the competition in an early hole. When the YouTuber, Luke Kwon, finally appeared, he seemed disinterested (or maybe just groggy-eyed), giving his teammate, Barstool’s PFT Commenter, the appearance of doubling-down on his mistake. A spicy back-and-forth ensued between Kwon and his teammate on camera. When the episode was published, the argument spilled out into the open internet and the episode quickly went viral, totaling more than 12 million views. Within days, Kwon had received so much criticism for his handling of the affair that he uploaded a video to his YouTube channel offering his side of the story … and a mea culpa.

“I apologize like, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart,” he said.

With Kwon’s help, the Internet Invitational was off and running, taking advantage of a quiet weekend on the golf calendar to push the strange new competitive format into the mainstream conversation. The first season ended a week later with one of the most remarkable finishes of any golf tournament in ’25, YouTube or otherwise, when Barstool’s Cody “Beef” Franke emerged as one of the season’s winners. Cameras captured Franke, who had died suddenly between the show’s filming and the final episode’s publish date, telling a teammate he would give his portion of the prize money to his parents to pay off their house, and donate the rest to charity. When the episode aired, Franke’s family and Bozoian set up a charity in “Beef’s” name to fund scholarships for aspiring PGA teaching pros.

“In order for the scholarship to go active and then be able to start withdrawing money and deciding candidates, there’s a certain threshold you have to raise,” Bozoian recalls. “We were told that could take years. I think they reached it in like 24 hours.”

Season 2 of the Internet Invitational begins with a callback to the fallen champ, whose family joins the first day of festivities at Big Cedar to offer an update on the scholarship and spur on the year’s competitors. Then things take off for the new year, which promises to be bigger, better, and more entertaining than ever.

In 2026, the competition grew to 64 players, the purse expanded to $4 million, and the surprises up Portnoy’s sleeve — financial and otherwise — were bolstered in kind. Bob Does Sports’ recruiting role took on considerably larger scope, too; after the outrageous success of season 1, every influencer with a pulse wanted a piece of the action in season 2. Berger and co. worked hard to make the Internet Invitational field representative of the broader YouTube golf demographic, which meant reaching far outside the circle of friendship.

“When the invite list and the participation list comes out, people break it down for weeks and they have their takes on it,” Bozoian says. “Are there enough women? Is there enough diversity? Should they have added more celebrities? Enticing the most engagement and interaction and excitement when it comes to the actual content is a very tricky puzzle.”

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Perhaps the biggest expansion, though, came in terms of pure production capacity. To execute the vision for the new season, Brendan Jones, the lead producer, was tasked with recruiting and organizing a small army of production wizards, including an entire battalion of freelance shooters, and leading that group through more than three months of near-constant fire until the final publish date.

Jones says he started the process over the summer, when he contacted most of the players in the field to ask if they had a videographer counterpart who might be willing to work on a freelance basis for the week. Most creators obliged, bringing their YouTube co-conspirators from as far away at Germany, and soon Jones had staffed a team of 82 cameramen and women to shoot the action “basically 24 hours a day.” Jones oversaw those videographers — along with 10 audio operators, 3 footage ingest specialists and 2 camera equipment managers — from a command center in the basement of the Payne’s Valley clubhouse. For the four days, the group did nothing but shoot footage, upload and organize it … and pray like hell that nothing good got missed.

“The production room that they had in the basement was the most anxiety-ridden room I’ve ever been by in my entire life,” Jones says with a slightly nervous laugh. “They get one chance at it. If we go out there and somebody just has a couple dead batteries… This is the one chance to get it.”

Thankfully, Jones’ crew got it … and then some. Barstool emerged from filming with 28 terabytes of footage, or about 800 hours of material. If Jones was lucky, the footage would be trimmed into six neatly edited episodes, or about 15-18 hours of footage. But the final decision on runtime and edit capacity would come down to Barstool’s YouTube strategy team, its post-production team, and then several teams of video editors, each of which was responsible for a different component of the show.

The first team of editors was effectively a clean-up crew — taking all of the raw footage from every single golf match and cutting it down into a neatly crafted, standalone edit. Each match came with a separate “log sheet,” which featured notable quotes, sponsor shoutouts, and transition opportunities to another match.

“If Big Cat says, ‘I wonder what Big John is doing on 5,’ — that’s my dream,” Jones says, slipping into the native parlance of his work. “It helps us tell the story.”

The second team of editors was from Barstool’s “reality” team, a group led by Kevin Zuppe and Mike DelloStritto, who were responsible for all of the storytelling outside of the golf course. Zuppe and DelloStritto’s goals were, in some ways, separate from the rest of the editing team: ensuring that Barstool had the best collection of drama-worthy footage for use in the reality portion of the show’s plot development. The “reality” team worked closely with the “teaser” team — the group responsible just for developing the most compelling opening 90 or so seconds of every video, an enormously important piece of performance within the YouTube algorithm.

And then, once each of these component parts was complete, the pieces were sent to the fourth and final edit layer: Jones and his team from Foreplay, a group that included Kyle Tims, Jared DeLibero and Ryan Richson. This squad was responsible for dragging each of these component parts into a coherent, unified narrative that people actually wanted to watch — and usually doing so within a matter of days. (Hence Jones’ reluctance to sleep.)

In the end, the process rivals anything in golf, save for possibly the major championship broadcasts, in terms of sheer manpower and technical might. For the first episode of season 2 alone, Barstool editors were responsible for creating more than 800 shot tracers.

“When it works, that gives me like three days to just hunker down, don’t talk to anybody, and work,” Jones says. “And apologize to my wife a million times.”

The goal of all that effort, according to Bozoian, is to build something durable and aspirational. While Bozoian, Jones, Portnoy and Berger are under no delusions about the Internet Invitational’s capacity to steal an audience from the PGA Tour, it’s not a stretch to say they’ve already built a competition capable of ginning up Tour-level money. In just its second season, the Internet Invitational’s purse already reaches the minimum threshold of a Tour “Challenger Series” event — and that’s before the financial bonuses sprinkled in over the course of filming.

Beyond Portnoy’s chaos-agent instincts, the key insight behind the event’s success has little to do with the power of YouTube or the changing methodologies of golf viewership — though they certainly apply here. It all comes back to something simpler, a component underpinning the entire enterprise of YouTube golf that few “establishment” golf types have fully grasped: Golf is also a participatory sport.

Pro golf is aspirational like private jets are aspirational: we know they exist and can admire from afar, but most of us will never experience them from the inside. YouTube golf is aspirational like a pickup truck is aspirational: We don’t have to try very hard to see ourselves behind the wheel. At the Internet Invitational, the pickup drivers get a chance to play for $4 million.

“It’s almost like four different singles signed up for a 10 a.m. tee time,” Bozoian says. “You’re going to get a pretty good player who’s got a visor on and a belt from Winged Foot, and you’re going to get all the way down to somebody who picked up the game during Covid and is out there wanting to play music and trying to make three pars.”

It’s an extraordinary effort to get all those normal golfers in one place at the same time in front of the leering lenses of the camera. But it doesn’t take long to understand it’s worth it — even for the tortured producer surrendering his sanity to it.

““There are only so many times in a career where you feel like you’re actually doing something that makes a difference, or when you’re actually doing something meaningful,” Jones says.

“This? This is meaningful.”