Glen Powell to Star in College Football Comedy Series Based on Viral Eli Manning Character
In 2022, former New York Giants and Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning underwent a transformation.
For an episode of Eli’s Places—his college football docuseries on ESPN+—Manning went undercover at Penn State’s walk-on tryouts as a player named Chad Powers. The self-deprecating segment turned into a huge hit, and has currently been viewed over 15 million times on ESPN’s YouTube channel.
According to Variety, that segment is now set to become a series on Hulu starring Glen Powell. The Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You star will co-create the show alongside screenwriter Michael Waldron; the Manning brothers will serve as executive producers.
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“We’re both diehard college football fans. When we saw Eli as Chad Powers, we knew that was the way into a big, fun story about this world,” Powell and Waldron told Variety in a statement.
Per the showrunners, the story will follow Powell’s character as he “disguises himself and walks onto a struggling Southern football team as the talented, affable Chad Powers.”
As Variety noted, Apple TV+’s critical and commercial smash Ted Lasso arose from a similar premise—a series of early-2010s promotional segments for NBC’s Premier League broadcasts starring Jason Sudeikis.