Barstool Sports’ Internet Invitational wrapped its second season yesterday, pitting 64 of the internet’s biggest golf creators and athletes against each other for a $4M prize pool.
We spoke with Brendan Jones, senior producer at Barstool Sports who led the three-month production to learn how they pulled it off →
Earlier this year, the 2026 PGA tour averaged 2.7M viewers across CBS and NBC.
The Internet Invitational drew over 41M views across six episodes released exclusively on YouTube via Barstool Sports, Fore Play Golf, and Bob Does Sports.
So how does a YouTube production rival golf’s biggest events?
Filming took place over one week in early August. What became 21 hours of content started as 800+ hours of raw footage captured on 80+ cameras, 67 mics, 10 audio operators, three drones, and around 30 GoPros mounted in carts.
“That’s the most nerve-wracking part—making sure that you get everything on site,” Jones told us.
His system, borrowed from his MLB and NHL Network days, was to have ten editors cut every match hole-by-hole and log everything into one master sheet he could mine for story.
“If you capture everything, you essentially have every storyline…then it’s just finding a needle in a haystack,” Jones said.
A two-person reality team cuts everything between rounds, while Jones works to make the final edit feel native to the platform.
“Natural banter and human interaction is the content that people can relate to, and I think that’s why the Internet Invitational is as successful as it is,” Jones said.
His advice for creators is to leave room to capture those in-between moments that can’t be manufactured.
“Turn the cameras on and keep them rolling, because you never know what you’re gonna get,” Jones said.
