Irish In The NFL: Claypool On His YouTube Channel, NFL Combine Secrets
Chase Claypool is a Pittsburgh Steeler now and expectations for the 6-4, 238-pound wide receiver are sky high.
Yet that doesn’t seem to faze him.
In media availability at Notre Dame, the brooding pass catcher always seemed serious and intense. Given his large physical stature, he was almost intimidating, but since he has moved on to the lifestyle of a professional football player, he has shown off his playful side.
Claypool is now trying to parlay his newly on display public personality into becoming the next YouTube sensation and has his own channel with just less than 8,000 subscribers. But his first and only video “Moving into Steel City! | Pittsburgh I’m home” has already garnered more than 60,000 views.
In the video, all the hulking wide receiver does is pick out furniture for his empty Steel City apartment and get into a strange altercation with his air mattress (yes, you read that sentence correctly). Still the video is well produced, surprisingly entertaining and shows off a side of Claypool that Fighting Irish fans didn’t get to see while he was in South Bend.
“YouTube was something I’ve been planning on doing for a long time,” Claypool said on the podcast 4th and Forever with Mark Sanchez. “I figured that in football, obviously while wearing your helmet, it’s very hard to be marketable when no one really knows what you look like.”
Essentially, his goal is to show everyone who he is “behind the helmet” and showcase his life away from the football field.
Given the grind of preparing for and playing in the NFL, Claypool knows he won’t have the time or energy to produce YouTube content multiple times per week, so instead his goal is to post one or two videos a month.
This means, that assuming there NFL season proceeds as scheduled, the best way for Notre Dame fans to keep up with Claypool should be by watching him play on Sundays.
Even as a rookie, many are expecting him to be a featured part of the Steelers’ offense, especially in the red zone — a particularly weak area for Pittsburgh in 2019.
Some of this hype stems from Claypool's eye-opening NFL Combine performance, where he put up numbers that put him in a category with future Hall-of-Fame wide receiver Calvin Johnson.
The extra attention to his performance started when he first weighed in at the NFL Combine and hundreds of fans on Twitter saw that Claypool had added almost 10 pounds to his collegiate playing weight.
Immediately, people began to speculate that he would inevitably move to tight end in the NFL.
As opposed to stressing about this extra attention, an amused Claypool sat back and enjoyed the conversation. This was all part of the plan.
“Probably week before the Combine, me and my two agents Kyle McCarthy and Brian Murphy got in an argument on what I should weigh. I was at 235 and I was like, ‘I could easily put on five more pounds and be 240.’ … Kyle was like, ‘No shot. If you can get below 230, that’s great.’ But I didn’t want to because I knew what I was going to run.”
His thought process was that the more he weighed the more impressive his 40-yard dash time would be, so he put on a few more pounds and watched social media explode.
His 40 time and vertical jump would speak for themselves.
But it took some time for Claypool to have the maturity to let his play do the talking.
As a freshman at Notre Dame, coming from a small town in British Columbia, Canada, Claypool had a chip on his shoulder.
“When I went into camp, I had a DB [who shall remain nameless] trying to press me,” Claypool said. “Not even pressing me off the line, but trying to challenge me because I was a young dude.
“We ended up fighting because I figured he was only doing that because I was Canadian, and I didn’t want to be the guy who went in there and got pushed around.”
But after the fight, Claypool quickly saw his playing time in practice diminish, which signaled that — at least in most cases — fighting was frowned upon.
Over the next few seasons, he went from special teams stalwart and blossomed into a team MVP as a senior.
Now in the NFL, the future is bright for the former Notre Dame wide receiver, and fans can get a behind-the-scenes look at the next chapter of his football journey on YouTube.
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