Even As An English Guy, I Loved ‘SEC Football: Any Given Saturday’

You could write what I know about American Football — even calling it football makes me wince — on the back of a postcard, but since I firmly believe that sport is universal, by extension, I think that sports documentaries should operate the same way. An English TV critic with barely any knowledge of college football should be able to tune into SEC: Any Given Saturday and appreciate what it’s doing, just as long as it’s doing it well. Well, let me tell you, folks — it’s doing it very well indeed.

It helps that the format is familiar and has been proven to work many times already, especially by Netflix, home of this series as well as several other similar ones like Last Chance U and Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Any Given Saturday does for college football what those other shows you’re thinking of did for other sports, even recently – though not as successfully, for very specific reasons – in WWE: Unreal. It’s taking something that might be quite niche globally and honing in on what makes it popular with its core demographic, showing audiences the human side of players, coaches, and key personnel, and letting the competitive stakes do the dramatic heavy lifting. It’s popular because it works.

Ahead of the 2025 SEC football season – the Southeastern Conference being the biggest in college football, I’m led to believe – Any Given Saturday goes behind the scenes of the 2024 season, focusing on various key fixtures and giving viewers an inside look at the players and coaching teams involved. Various other talking heads also give important context about regional rivalries, the legacies of certain figures, and the importance of particular games that help the layman – like me – to navigate some of the sport’s finer details. And this is perhaps the most crucial point, since college football crowds are so rabid that they don’t have time to explain anything to anyone.

Based on the sideline sequences in this docuseries, I understand why. Granted, a match that can run over three hours being condensed into snippets of a 50-minute TV episode is going to paint a pretty picture of highlights and drama that might not necessarily be reflective of the overall game, but on the other hand, who cares? The high points are what people remember, and the dramatic last-minute finish of, say, LSU vs South Carolina, which caps off a comeback for the ages with a missed field goal that would have reversed the outcome, had even me on tenterhooks.

This is partly a consequence of the storytelling structure. The game-per-episode format is genius, since it mandates a certain amount of on-field action with every instalment but leaves plenty of room for dynamics between coaches and players to emerge quite organically. By the time the game itself rolls around, you’re already paying attention to the star linebacker on one team and the personable coach on the other, wondering how the events will impact both of them. You’re invested. And that’s the key.

By putting you front and centre on game day with all of the appropriate necessary context, shows like SEC Football: Any Given Saturday are essentially letting newcomers – and existing fans alike, to be fair, but for them, a lot of this will be common knowledge or recent memory – get right to the heart of a sport. The showrunners know that the sport is, ultimately, capable of speaking for itself, so the skill is in the framing. When that framing includes all of the players and not just head coaches, but supporting staff and colorful local characters, you’re onto a winner. Again.