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Is Tom Brady's viral video real or fake?

Tom Brady is great, but he's not that great. Is he?

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
3 min read
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The experts are calling "fake."

Twitter

Tom Brady is maybe the best NFL quarterback ever,  so it's not hard to believe he can do pretty much anything when it comes to throwing a football. But can he do what he appears to be doing in a video Brady shared on Twitter? Probably not.

In the video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times, Brady is seen firing a football into a, uh, "Jugs" machine (supposedly named for the baseball expression "jug-handle curve"). Every time, Brady lands the ball perfectly, and the machine waits a second, then fires it back.

"Training camp starts this week," the quarterback for the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers writes. "I'm looking forward to having some actual receivers again…"

Brady is good, but this is Minnesota Fats trick shot good. And it turns out even an athlete as good as Brady needed some help with this one. When he posted the video on Instagram, Brady tagged video director Ari Fararooy and creative agency Shadow Lion, a company that was founded "with the goal of supporting Tom Brady's off-field media efforts." 

Fararooy captioned the video on his own Instagram by saying, "haters will say it's fake," and then explained things/muddied the waters further by crediting himself as the director and person in charge of VFX (visual effects), Shadow Lion as the producer, and creative studio Warm N Fuzzy TV with the CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

Fararooy and representatives for Shadow Lion and Warm N Fuzzy TV didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But urban-legends site Snopes.com seized on the viral video and started pointing out that, in addition to the credits given to people who work to create special effects, there are other indicators that this isn't real.

Snopes points out a three-tweet thread from the Captain Disillusion account, which often points out and explains fake or misleading images and videos.

"Note how the patch of the background behind/above the machine wobbles differently from the rest of the environment," the account noted. "It's hiding a person who was catching/throwing back the ball I guess. Also......check out how the machine & its cord slide around on the field. The perfect isolation and the single rigid toy bounce with which it falls tell me it's CG! They prob didn't want to crash a real machine because for some reason they cost $2K dollars."

Fake or real, fans had fun with Brady's video, Remember that deflated football issue back when Brady was with the New England Patriots? Twitter users sure do.

"Is that fully inflated?" wrote Andrew Feinberg.

Another person thought the machine could make an NFL team, writing, "Sign that thing to a 3yr 15mil contract."

Said one Twitter user of the video, "I can't tell if this is real or nah."

And someone else responded, "the fact that we have to consider it, shows his greatness lmao."

It won't be long before Brady will be out there throwing for real again. The Bucs' first preseason game is Aug. 14 against the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Bucs will play the Dallas Cowboys in the first real game of the NFL season on Sept. 9.