A year ago this month, NFL Films did something the league office would very much like back: it posted a clip on X of Lions safety Brian Branch getting torched in Detroit’s Week 6 loss to the Chiefs, narrated by Louis Riddick, and then yanked it within hours. The clip showed Branch losing snaps to Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes and Xavier Worthy before the postgame fight with JuJu Smith-Schuster. The timing is the whole story, and it is worse than the usual tale of a talking head getting corrected.
Update, October 2026: This is a year-old controversy, and Branch has had a harder year since. He tore his Achilles in Week 14 of the 2025 season and, per Newsweek, returned to practice from the physically-unable-to-perform list on October 7.
Three Days of Discipline, Then a Highlight Reel
Branch was suspended one game without pay on Monday, October 13, for his role in the fight, and the NFL upheld the suspension on appeal on Wednesday, October 15. The next day, Thursday, NFL Films put the clip on X. By all accounts it was gone within hours. Read that sequence again: the league finishes disciplining a player, then its own production arm posts a montage of his worst plays.
The clip came out of NFL Films’ coverage of the game, with Riddick on the voiceover. Awful Announcing and Pride of Detroit both documented how it landed in Detroit, which was not well.
What the League and Riddick Said
On Friday, October 17, NFL Films explained itself through a statement relayed to Pat McAfee. The sequence, it said, “felt different to NFL Films as part of a 9-minute breakdown of the Lions-Chiefs game,” and on X “it felt overly critical to Brian Branch so it was taken down.” Riddick said there was never any intent to do a hit piece on anyone, conceded the short version could be read as piling on Branch and the Lions, and said he did not want to be part of that.
That is a candid answer. It is also the argument for not posting the clip in the first place.
The Lions Did Not Wait for the Apology
Detroit’s locker room had opinions. Amon-Ra St. Brown said, “I thought that video was crazy,” and added that he did not know why it was released. DJ Reader said, “People who care about you don’t do that.” Lineman Dan Skipper called it “a smear campaign against BB from the shield.” And Dan Campbell, per Sports Illustrated, said that if you attack their brother, “that’s what they’re gonna do,” that Branch was paying for what happened, and that he would be back for the next game against Minnesota.
Notice what the players were objecting to. Nobody argued that Branch played well. They argued about why the clip existed at all.
A Format Problem With a League Logo on It
Here is the lesson, and it is narrower than “pundit overruled by people who know the game.” A nine-minute breakdown reads one way. Chop it into a short clip, drop it on a social feed, and it reads as a pile-on, three days after the player was punished. That is a context problem created by the format, and every outlet that turns long-form analysis into social clips has it.
Riddick’s ability to break down tape is not what is in question. The decision to post that cut, on that day, is, and the league made the call itself and reversed it before most fans had finished the scroll.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep watching what happens when the highlight machine and the discipline office share a building.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
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