Jakob Berger has reached 100,000 followers on TikTok and his videos have been watched nearly 5 million times, catapulting him to a level of social media fame that he never saw coming when he began mimicking NFL announcers in exaggerated fashion.
"I don't know the guy's name. I had a bunch of people tweet me about it when he did 2009, Favre throws an interception to Tracy Porter," Minnesota Vikings radio announcer Paul Allen said shortly after learning of Berger's viral clips back in April 2023. "The guy's unbelievable."
Who is Jakob Berger? He's a 22-year-old former college baseball pitcher from Dallas, Texas who when he's not making viral announcer videos – that he describes as "funny and exaggerated reenactments" – is working a full-time job at a distribution center that provides perimeter security and fencing throughout North America.
Berger's reenactment of Allen's Favre interception call in the fourth quarter of the 2009 NFC Championship Game has nearly 450,000 views on TikTok. While his lip-syncing skills are solid, its his body language and facial expressions that make him comedy gold.
Berger created his first TikTok video in July 2021. He started with basic rankings and predictions before getting the idea to mimic the announcers from the Madden video game franchise.
"I thought of this idea a while back with Madden commentary clips. I constantly saw a bunch of people complaining or making fun of the commentary in the game because how weird and awkward they sound," Berger told Bring Me The Sports. "So I thought it would be a funny idea to make videos on what it would look like if we were able to see the commentators while making their calls."
That idea took off, so he decided to expand his enterprise with real world announcers, namely Allen and Fox Sports' play-by-play broadcaster Gus Johnson.
Berger's recreation of the Arizona Cardinals preventing the Vikings from making the playoffs in 2003 has more than 950,000 views on TikTok.
Making the switch from Madden to NFL announcers helped launch his channel into the mainstream, garnering the attention of people outside of the TikTok platform, including thousands of Vikings fans. But as viral as his Vikings highlights have gone, they're still not to the level of some of his most viral Madden clips, some of which have between 2-3 million views on TikTok.
Berger himself in a Steelers fan, though he's grown fond of Allen and color commentator Pete Bercich, whom he also mimics in his videos.
"While they are one of my favorite teams, I’m actually not a Vikings fan. I’m a huge Steelers fan. My dad grew up in the '70s and became a Steelers fan during that time, so I was kinda born into it," he told Bring Me The Sports.
"I’ve always liked the Vikings though," he added. "My liking for them grew throughout this past year when I started posting my videos on Twitter. I received so much love from Paul, Pete and that entire fanbase. They’ve made this experience a lot more fun than it already was."
At 22, Berger understands the unpredictability of content success on social media. But he says he had a feeling his idea would play well on TikTok.
"With social media, TikTok more specifically, you can’t expect anything. The algorithm is weird," he said. "There’s been so many times where I thought a video would do well and it didn’t and many times where I didn’t expect much and it did. In this case I had a feeling this idea would do pretty well, but not to the extent that it did. I’d be lying if I said I fully expected this outcome, but I had a good feeling going into it."
Berger would love to be a full-time content creator if the opportunity presents itself, but for now he's just enjoying an audience that is growing bigger by the day. And he can rest assured that Allen and the Vikings will gift him emotional gold in the weeks and years ahead.
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