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College football teams need to be a well-oiled machine with a ton of different people working in harmony to set them up for success. Players and coaches obviously get the most attention, but there are plenty of relatively unheralded contributors—including an assistant at Rice who went viral for his role as the team’s designated “Candy Guy.”
Every football game features people performing some pretty thankless jobs, whether we’re talking about the police officers who escort the head coaches to midfield after the final whistle blows or the staffers who spend the contest roaming the field with bottles of water they’re prepared to squirt into the mouths of thirsty players at a moment’s notice.
Now, I’m going to assume the guy who was patrolling the sidelines for Rice when they faced off against Tulsa on Thursday night had multiple duties he was tasked with attending to during the contest.
However, there was one job in particular that managed to capture the attention of the internet, as he was filmed walking around with a giant bag of sour gummy worms he handed out to members of the Owls.
Some say he has the most important job in football… #GummyWormGuy @BussinWTB pic.twitter.com/ATx094ppHy
— Aaron Smith (@Aaron_Smith95) October 19, 2023
The person who captured that clip shared another that showed the assistant opted to swap out the gummy worms for jelly beans in the second half, which (at least in my humble opinion) seems like a bit of a downgrade.
This isn’t the first time gummy worms have been deployed during a college game in Tulsa, as the baseball team at Oral Roberts has used them to reward players who get on base.
I’m not going to suggest Rice’s Candy Guy was the primary reason the Owls walked away with the 42-10 victory over the Golden Hurricane on Thursday, but on the other hand, there’s no way to prove that he wasn’t.