Brandon Perna might be the only Broncos fan grateful for the Russell Wilson era of Denver football. 

Not for the quality of play — the Broncos notched 11 wins to 19 losses with Wilson as starting quarterback — or even because Wilson’s departure set the stage for a 2024 playoff berth and a 9-2 record this season, so far, for Perna’s hometown team.

No, Wilson in the orange and blue made Perna miserable. And man, was that good for clicks.

That misery helped Perna, 41, turn his own fandom into a flourishing YouTube channel. It’s one that’s lowbrow but thoughtful, and that takes fans seriously but treats sports fandom as what it’s supposed to be — fun.

“I don’t care if they’re … taking a 20-minute bathroom break at work to watch power rankings — like, (heck) yeah,” Perna said, reflecting on his audience in a recent interview in his home studio in Aurora. “Or they’re putting it on before they go to bed. Whatever it is, it makes me excited to do the next one. And hopefully I didn’t betray anybody by saying ‘Your team sucks’ the week before.”

Profane, inane and unapologetically pro-Broncos — “Go (expletive) yourselves, Kansas City” might be his “quoth the Raven” refrain — Perna has been running the “That’s Good Sports” show on YouTube for more than a decade. In that time, he’s grown regular viewership to reach the hundreds of thousands, and recently he crested 820,000 subscribers for the four or more videos he posts every week.

His self-described “bad football news presented in the form of even worse comedy” has grown into T-shirts, coffee custom-crafted for fans frustrated with awful penalties and an online community that spans the globe. His weekly “curse wheel,” which randomly targets teams for misfortune, had posted a playoff-level 9-2 record of successful curses through mid-November.

He’s navigated shifting YouTube algorithms, capricious sports gods and a saturated online market to turn his channel into a thriving operation.

It has grown from a one-man show to include co-writer Will Keys and editors Johnny Barker and Connor Sherrill, folks Perna credits with keeping the commentary sharp and production regular. He shouts out to other sports YouTubers like Tom Grossi and traditional sportscasters like Vic Lombardi for helping him find his footing.

Having the team in place ahead of the Wilson season had the channel ready to capitalize on the sudden influx of viewers. But getting to that point took years of toiling, as well as treating the burgeoning channel as a job — even when it didn’t have the paycheck associated with it.

‘Bigger and bigger goals’

Perna started working in the YouTube world as a video editor in the late 2000s, and he started running his channel casually in the early 2010s. He had left the increasingly corporate world of big-time YouTube production to focus on freelancing.

A quick, janky video, as he put it, changed things.

Peyton Manning, then the Broncos’ quarterback, threw seven touchdowns against the Baltimore Ravens in 2013 — a feat that hadn’t been accomplished in more than 40 years at that point. And that video’s success showed him there was an audience for his brand of irreverent analysis.

Over the following years, Perna was able to dedicate more time to the channel and lean on his wife, Jess Filipas, as the primary breadwinner. Some months and years tested his conviction — whether it was a bad Broncos season, the channel not hitting the way he knew it could, or personal travails, she said.

But his convictions — his authenticity about the views he brought — never wavered, Filipas said.

The relentless publishing schedule started to pay literal dividends in the late 2010s, to the point that Filipas was able to step back from her full-time job. Then they welcomed a newborn girl to the world in 2020.

The channel weathered the pandemic, as more folks chose to spend time indoors, leading to more sponsorships and contractual obligations. More production led to deeper connections with the audience — and between the cross-country team behind each episode.

“Things have gotten more complicated, but he’s had bigger and bigger goals,” Filipas said of her husband. “But he’s always known there’s more out there than him in the basement doing these videos alone.”

Keys, a lifelong Broncos fan who’s based in Sacramento, looped in with Perna in 2018. He started as a fan of the channel and clicked with Perna as a co-writer. The two cover each other’s blind spots and have similar enough senses of humor that they can fine-tune the antics that draw in viewers, Keys said.

Perna can read a phone book into his camera and get laughs, Keys said, and the visual humor of editors Barker and Sherrill completes the package.

They strive to show respect for the audience and to have breadth of coverage, Keys and Perna said. They don’t ignore games and don’t hate on teams or players. Even the epithets for the Kansas City Chiefs are built on divisional rivalry and that team’s long track record of success, not sneering dismissiveness.

In addition to news and game-driven publishing, Perna’s team also produces deep-dive pieces to help explain how the NFL arrived where it is today, whether that’s meant looking at past dynasties or broadcasting deep analysis of draft classes.

“People come back because I think they learn something,” Keys said “… We try to put a lot of thought into getting a good script, coming back to it multiple times, adding nuggets of information that no one else has.”

Perna will spend 75 hours a week working in the basement, writing and producing videos, Filipas said.

But he also pops up to play with their daughter — moments the whole family treasures, even if Filipas jokes about scheduling weekend outings so they’re not “listening to this madman scream about football” through the vents of their home during his Broncos livestreams.

Curse wheels and the joys of sports

Perna said he “did things the wrong way, probably stubbornly, for too long,” before finding success. He had expanded his coverage to the entire NFL, which helped draw in more eyeballs, and established a rhythm and a voice that kept them coming back.

But it was the Broncos’ two seasons with Wilson, the savior-turned-millstone of a floundering franchise, that truly helped the channel find its stride in 2022 and 2023, Perna said. Viewership exploded as people flocked to Perna’s weekly heartbreak.

One particularly ghastly outing, in which the Broncos lost to the Indianapolis Colts 12-9 on a Thursday night in 2022, also stands out to Perna. His publishing schedule keeps him from going to many games in person; that slog of a game was a rare exception.

Perna took his frustrations to his channel with an episode titled “The Worst Game Ever,” which went on to become another recurring theme.

The YouTube audience, it turned out, “enjoyed watching me be miserable,” Perna jokes now. But the show tapped into the highs and lows that most every sports fan experiences.

“If (Denver is) winning, you’re just going to have Broncos fans (watching) — and they’re excited with you,” Perna said. “When they’re losing, literally any fan of any team could come in and be like, ‘Look at this idiot suffering because his team let him down.’ ”

Those other fans make up some of the bread and butter of the channel’s audience. Perna looks to respect their time with real analysis tucked between the same lowbrow gags that won their attention in the first place. (“I’ve really got to find a way to spread out these poop awards,” Perna said on a recent episode, flashing an impish grin. “It makes me look immature.”)

Other gimmicks have taken on a life of their own.

Most NFL coverage features some kind of power rankings, where analysts try to list the best teams. Perna sees it as a tropey exercise in a sport where anything can happen any week.

So he’s added his own twist: a plastic, “Wheel of Fortune”-style spinning wheel — only with curses instead of prizes tied to the wedges. A spin of the wheel will doom the highlighted team. How that doom arrives, however, is part of the mystery.

Teams losing, poor outings from key players or even injuries get blamed on the wheel. For instance, Broncos star player Pat Surtain II, one of Perna’s favorite players, got hurt the week the wheel landed on Denver, even as the team won.

“Don’t let Pat find out!” Perna said. “That’s one we want back.”

Fans rewatch the episode to tally the wheel’s latest victims, Perna said, giving extra life to the channel and the community that’s grown around it.

“Russell Wilson and the curse wheel,” Perna laughs, crediting them for his success. “Those are the two things.” 

Now that Perna has trialed-and-errored his way into what makes the channel work — and settled into 15-hour days to keep up with the football and posting schedules — he doesn’t want to lose focus on that community of supporters.

“The support is overwhelming and humbling, and I try to never take that for granted,” Perna said. “Because they keep you relevant in the space.”

He also gets to see how his formula as an overly dire, overly enthusiastic and consistently irreverent voice plays in an era long-missed by Broncos fans: a season of must-watch Denver football.

The wins this year have been ugly, improbable and exhilarating. Or, in a word, captivating — even for an audience outside of Broncos Country. The wins have also been piling up at a much faster clip than at any time since Perna made his show his primary professional focus. 

“I’m ready for the Broncos to have some actual post-season success. Because I feel like once I’ve learned how to do this correctly, the Broncos haven’t been in the post-season,” Perna said.

“Last year, they got there. They didn’t win, of course, but we were just happy they were there. I hadn’t had the Broncos in the playoffs when I feel like I’ve done this (show) the right way. So much of (the Broncos’ success) predated that. So I’m enthusiastic that they’re winning.”

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