USC student becomes internet famous for his remarkably bad fantasy football team

Dylan Jackson is a University of South Carolina senior hoping to make a name for himself in sports social media management when he graduates in May.

Over the weekend, his fantasy football team gave him an accidental head start.

Jackson, a 20-year-old journalism major from Charleston, didn’t think the tweet he fired off during Sunday night’s Buccaneers-Cowboys NFL game was all that special.

But a simple post lamenting his fantasy team’s Week 1 performance turned into an overnight viral success, with thousands in the fantasy football community jumping in to commiserate with — or critique — a starting lineup that failed rather spectacularly on the NFL’s opening weekend.

“I’ve been calling it the most popular fantasy football team in the world right now,” Jackson told The State on Monday, laughing.

Jackson was projected by ESPN’s algorithm to rack up a strong 121.3 points in his 12-team fantasy football league, which follows standard scoring and awards one point per reception. During a week that saw plenty of individual fantasy success, though, injuries and inefficiency left his final lineup in shambles.

San Francisco 49ers running back Elijah Mitchell (4.1 points) sprained his MCL. Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins (4.7 points) got a concussion.

LA Chargers kicker Dustin Hopkins (six points) and the Philadelphia Eagles defense/special teams unit (five points) barely made a dent, and Atlanta Falcons tight end Kyle Pitts (3.9 points) and LA Rams receiver Allen Robinson II (2.2 points) were even worse.

A short receiving touchdown by Steelers running back Najee Harris made for a salvageable 10.6-point day, but it didn’t matter. Any chances of Jackson’s team bouncing back on Sunday Night Football were extinguished, too, with Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott (1.32 points) and receiver CeeDee Lamb (2.6 points) both struggling mightily against the Bucs at halftime.

That’s when Jackson snapped a screenshot of his ESPN lineup – which, at a whopping 36.5 points across nine players, had been outpaced by Minnesota Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson alone (39.4 points) — and shared it with his roughly 1,200 Twitter followers.

Going viral

“I have no words,” he wrote at 9:39 p.m. Sunday.

Defeated, he turned off the game to do schoolwork and stayed away from his phone outside of a few check-ins. His self-deprecating tweet had 60 or so likes after an hour and a half, he said, and jumped to around 600 as he was falling asleep past midnight.

That was certainly “doing better than the average Twitter post,” Jackson said, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before in his previous social media and digital content internship work with the USC athletics department, Pro Football Focus and the Columbia Fireflies.

Then he woke up Monday morning.

Thanks to a share from PFF, where Jackson is interning this fall, his 36.5-point dud was making the rounds. Hundreds of likes turned into thousands as major players such as the Matthew Berry Fantasy Life account (“Sending thoughts”) to ESPN’s Field Yates (“This might be the best worst fantasy week of all time”) chimed in. Bleacher Report even sent a push notification to its app users.

A sampling of other reactions:

▪ “Okay maybe my team’s not that bad”

▪ “Why I’ll never do fantasy again”

▪ “This is NASTY”

After factoring in the second half of Cowboys-Bucs, which saw Prescott leave with a thumb injury that’ll reportedly sideline him for six to eight weeks, Jackson’s lineup finished with 45.86 points. He ended up losing by 107.04 points, as his opponent dropped 152.9 points (more than three times his total).

“Any group chat I’m in, they’ve seen this,” he said.

Let Jackson politely correct the record here, too, on a number of critiques popping up in his replies. He’s been playing fantasy football since third grade, when he started a league with his family, and has competed in five or six leagues annually during his years at USC.

Jackson researches extensively, drafts high-upside players and is actually the reigning champion of The Fellas™, the league with college buddies in which his viral fail occurred.

“I’d like to think I’m a lot more sharp than the average person,” he said, “which may not be completely obvious based on the screenshot.”

Though Prescott’s injury will require him to find a new quarterback, Jackson hasn’t lost hope in his roster just yet, citing the past production of young fantasy stars Harris, Pitts and Higgins. He also has Eagles running back Miles Sanders on his bench as a Mitchell fill-in and is stashing Cardinals receiver DeAndre Hopkins, who returns in Week 7 after a suspension.

For an aspiring social media manager, Sunday’s tweet was also a learning experience. Jackson reiterates he didn’t know he’d go viral, but looking back on his tweet he picked up on a number of technical things that made it work: a simple caption, a strong visual component and a clear contrast between his projected (121.3) and then-current (36.5) point totals in the bottom right corner.

If you want virality, he said, “it’s about accessibility.”

One final twist: Jackson spent his summer with the Fireflies, Columbia’s minor league baseball team, as a social/digital media intern. One of his big goals was, essentially, to create viral moments that he could showcase on Gondola, a portfolio website for content creators.

Try as he might, he never hit that coveted threshold during the Fireflies’ 2022 season, which wrapped late Sunday afternoon in Segra Park. Then, literally an hour and half after his internship ended, Jackson shared his fantasy football lineup with the world on a whim.

After spending 66 home games searching for the perfect post, he’d done it by accident 90 minutes later. As of Tuesday morning, Jackson’s tweet had 10,279,256 impressions (essentially views) and 459,671 engagements (likes, retweets and quote tweets). So … Gondola material?

“Yeah, this is definitely going on there,” Jackson said.

He finally got his viral moment.

Now he just needs a better Week 2.