Six years ago, Donald De La Haye put his NFL dreams on the back burner, but he just took a big step toward that goal. The face of the Deestroying channel has received a contract with the San Antonio Brahmas of the newly-formed United Football League (UFL).
De La Haye rose to prominence while attending the University of Central Florida, where he played as a kicker for the school’s football team. In his Deestroying videos, he chronicled his experience as a college athlete, but the NCAA took issue with his channel. In 2017, De La Haye was ruled ineligible due to the ad revenue he made from his YouTube videos.
Though he never played for UCF again, he became a key advocate for creator-athletes after earning a favorable court decision in 2018. Many of the student-athletes who have benefitted from the NCAA’s updated NIL policy have cited Deestroying as a pioneering channel.
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De La Haye’s emergence as a top sports creator (he currently reaches 5.7 million subscribers on YouTube) put his pro football aspirations on hold, but he never gave up on his dream of playing in the NFL. At the start of 2024, he launched the first episode of Project NFL, a series that chronicles his attempt to earn a kicking contract in North America’s most-watched sports league.
“My life may seem perfect on the outside, but on the inside, I feel empty,” De La Haye said in the intro to Project NFL. “I’ve inspired millions of people around the world, some people even say they look up to me, but every single day when I look at myself in the mirror, I feel like a failure.”
To get his special teams skills up to a professional level, De La Haye kicked in front of an NFL coach and worked alongside former Dallas Cowboys player Luis Zendejas at a facility called The Kicking Factory. The third episode of Project NFL ended with De La Haye receiving a contract offer from the Brahmas, who welcomed him to “the herd” on X.
This is the second time De La Haye has inked a deal with a pro team. In 2019, he appeared in preseason games for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, but that stint ended after a few months.
His upcoming turn on the gridiron will take him within a stone’s throw of the NFL. The UFL was born last year out of a merger between two second-tier football leagues, the USFL and the XFL. The Brahmas, who came to the UFL from the XFL, have signed many players with NFL experience.
There’s more than one creator on the team’s roster, too. In addition to De La Haye, Brahmas quarterback Kurt Benkert is active on YouTube, where he posts videos that apply NFL-approved strategies to video games like Madden.
De La Haye’s status as the Brahmas kicker is far from secure. The creator’s competition for the starting job is NFL vet Matt Ammendola, whom he described as a “good friend.” The competition will be fierce, but De La Haye told the San Antonio Express-News that he’s “kicking better than I’ve ever kicked.”
With that confidence in tow, he’ll try to show onlookers that his Brahmas contract is more than just a publicity stunt. The inaugural UFL season is scheduled to kick off on March 30.
