Every six months or so, in a quiet moment after he’s put his kids to bed, Ben Onda finds himself rewatching the YouTube video he made at 16 years old that changed his entire life. 

Onda is a full-time video editor who owns his own LLC, Onda Top Media. His career has crossed paths with future Hall of Famers in the Houston area, like James Harden, Russell Westbrook, and Andre Johnson. But he’s convinced that his high school buddy Sam McGuffie, the blur on the other end of the screen hurdling defenders, is the greatest athlete he’s ever seen. 

Goosebumps still sprout on his arms when he hears the opening line of McGuffie’s highlight tape: “This is the way it should sound.” Those words are so fitting for him, McGuffie, and the recruiting landscape this video forever altered. 

That all-nighter Onda pulled, cutting over 30 minutes of McGuffie’s junior year highlights at Cy-Fair High School into a crisp 5 minutes and 53 seconds, was the first moment Onda said that this is the way he should make a career.   

The 3.2 million people who watched McGuffie’s greatest runs from a 3,121-yard and 44-touchdown season said that this is the way a running back should play. 

And the countless high school recruits who came after McGuffie said this is the way they should market themselves to get a scholarship. 

“It was so much more than just a high school football highlight tape,” Onda said. “It kind of transcended football, because it was almost like a peek into the future. I mean, look at where we are now! Everybody’s got a Hudl tape.” 

McGuffie is a Bo Jackson-esque figure in TXHSFB history. There may have been better football players, but there was no better pure athlete. Onda remembers McGuffie sprinting around his cul-de-sac, perfectly balanced on the curb like American Ninja Warrior. He did standing front flips as party tricks, whether over a parked sedan in the Sonic drive-thru or over 6-foot-7-inch offensive lineman J.B. Shugarts.

In the 19 years since the highlight tape was first posted, as the view count climbed by the hundreds of thousands, McGuffie became so famous that it’s often forgotten how overlooked he was before the video was posted. The first game of his senior year, against Houston Stratford, was billed as Sam McGuffie vs. Andrew Luck. McGuffie was arguably a bigger draw that night than the future first overall NFL Draft Pick. But McGuffie had asked Onda to make the highlight tape in the first place because he still hadn’t earned a scholarship after breaking Houston’s single-season rushing record as a junior. 

McGuffie was a 5-foot-9, 170-pound white running back, traits that didn’t entice college recruiters to stop by his games. So, what if he brought his games to them on a new video-sharing platform called YouTube, which had been created two years prior? That idea represents why the McGuffie mixtape has a special place in TXHSFB lore. It wasn’t just that the content was awesome, but that it made McGuffie the face of a revolution. In many ways, he was the internet’s first football recruit. How many of those 3.2 million people who watched his mixtape were watching their first-ever YouTube video?

“Before that tape, we were still in the BC time period of high school recruiting,” Onda said. “This was Before McGuffie and After McGuffie. Before McGuffie, maybe you’d mail your VHS tapes to a university, or you know a coach on staff, or a recruiter saw you, and word of mouth spread fast. We basically bypassed all of that. We have the evidence that this guy can ball, and we’re going to distribute it to the masses on the biggest scale that we possibly can. And we did it overnight, literally.”

In the pre-social media era, all McGuffie had to compare himself to other top recruits around Texas were season stats and physical measurements he found in Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine.

“I don’t know what other people are doing,” McGuffie said. “I just see stats. Like, ‘So-and-so in San Antonio rushed for this many yards.’ I don’t know what these people look like, what competition they’re playing against, or anything. I can’t really judge how good this video is.”

Onda, however, knew he was cooking with gas as he started splicing the highlights together on his Dell desktop. But even his wildest, teenage boy fantasy world couldn’t have conjured up the sensation McGuffie would become. ‘MySpace Tom,’ the co-founder of the social networking site who was automatically friended by every new user, put the video link in his bio. USC’s Pete Carroll, Florida’s Urban Meyer, and Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops all flew to Cypress, Texas, to visit McGuffie after viewing it. 

“I’m biased, obviously, but Sam’s tape is the one,” Onda said. “It’s like the Mecca. It’s the Holy Grail of the original YouTube highlight tapes. That got 3.2 million views in a world without smartphones.” 

They’d created the video overnight and made McGuffie a movement overnight. But overnight, they’d also built a myth so big it would’ve been impossible for anyone to live up to.

McGuffie chose Michigan because the running backs coach at the time, Fred Jackson, had told him as a freshman that he would come back to Cypress and recruit him as a senior. Looking back, McGuffie says he should’ve redshirted and let his body develop into a Big Ten football player. But he put an immense amount of pressure on himself to play as a true freshman, whether because he was just wired that way or wanted to prove he was worth the hype.

There were flashes of the creativity he displayed on the mixtape, like his 178 scrimmage yards against Notre Dame. But his freshman season was derailed by three separate concussions. McGuffie says now, however, that a hamstring injury he sustained long jumping as a senior was what actually did him in. On the rare occasion he watches game film from his time at Michigan, he doesn’t recognize the runner. Some of those concussions, he says, were because he couldn’t juke and stop and start on a dime anymore. Instead, he had to put his head down and lean into a hit for extra yards.

His hamstring trapped him in the defense’s grasp on the field, and his mind trapped him off of it. There were 100,000 people in the Big House, and he didn’t know a single one of them. He rarely left his dorm because he couldn’t think about anything other than his football career. McGuffie already had an intense drive before the mixtape. He saw football as his only path to a college education. But the sinister side of online virality, which McGuffie was one of the first to experience, is that it attaches a number of views and likes, and therefore a worth, to what someone produces, and fools them into mistaking that for who they are. Those exorbitant views, combined with McGuffie’s predisposition towards football, created a one-dimensional person, like he really was on a screen. 

“My mentality back then was a lot different than it is now,” McGuffie said. “I had to be the person I was to get out of my situation and get a scholarship. My whole focus was always on football and sports, and I did whatever I needed to do to pursue my dreams. At the time, it wasn’t like I had any plan of doing anything else but football.”

Wanting to get closer to home after a year in Michigan, McGuffie transferred to Rice University after the 2008 season. The Owls were coming off a 10-3 campaign under head coach David Bailiff, the first since 1949, with coordinator Tom Herman leading the nation's eighth-best scoring offense. McGuffie’s arrival and status as a hometown hero signaled a new era for the private university that was historically elite in the classroom but not on the football field. The football program held the first-ever press conference for an arriving transfer.   

 “That was a big deal, Sam was coming to Rice,” Bailiff said. “That helped us in our recruiting, because people said, ‘Well, if it’s good enough for Sam, it’s gotta be good enough for me.’”

Bailiff describes McGuffie as one of his favorite players he’s ever coached. He was humble and worked hard, and was also quietly one of the funniest kids on the team. Bailiff remembers when McGuffie had to sit out of a practice with a boot on his sprained ankle. After 10 minutes, Bailiff looked over and saw McGuffie had put a boot on the other foot, too. He wouldn’t sit still despite the injury, and he was tired of walking around with one leg higher than the other. 

But McGuffie’s reserved nature was also a double-edged sword. His viral fame as a high schooler created a circus around him that he wanted no part of, and because he wasn’t always willing to speak for himself, those who didn’t know him assumed the worst. 

“People thought he was entitled, but he was really just shy,” Bailiff said. “He didn’t like doing interviews. He didn’t like the press.”

Over three seasons at Rice, McGuffie became the first player in school history with over 1,000 rushing yards and over 1,000 receiving yards in his career. He was by no means a bust, but he wasn’t the player on the highlight tape, either. Part of it was that Tom Herman, the offensive coordinator McGuffie committed to, left before McGuffie could ever play for him. Part of it was injuries. But, mostly, how could he have ever outrun the expectations that come with the most viral mixtape of all time?

Rice’s Pro Day was McGuffie’s final chance to prove he belonged on an NFL roster. He may not have replicated his 3,000-yard junior season at Cy-Fair in college football, but he still had the athletic gifts on the video. During the year he sat out after transferring to Rice, McGuffie had practiced for the Conference USA decathlon for a week. He would’ve won it had he known how to pole vault. 

McGuffie ran a 4.32-second 40-yard dash, the same time as current Miami Dolphins running back Devon Achane. But he also bench pressed 225 pounds 26 times, the same as four-time Pro Bowl offensive lineman Frank Ragnow. His 42-inch vertical and 11-foot-2-inch broad jump would have been second-highest at the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine.

Those numbers got him a contract with the Oakland Raiders, and he bounced around practice squads with the Arizona Cardinals and New England Patriots. His brief NFL career was over, but he knew God had given him world-class athleticism, and he didn’t want to seem ungrateful for that gift. So, he played in the Canadian Football League for a stint. Then, he joined the United States Olympic Bobsled team and placed ninth at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. He even joined the first professional rugby team in North America, the Ohio Aviators. 

Did McGuffie really find a passion for all these sports? He describes competing in the bobsled as feeling like you’re stuck in a dryer. That’s actually a good metaphor for his mindset during his early 20s, competing in any sport he could to extract every last ounce of athletic juice that made him a viral phenomenon.  

“I feel like the first part of my life, until I was about 28, I was still trying to be an athlete because my thinking was, ‘Man, I’ve got to use my body for something, or it’s just a waste,’” McGuffie said. “So I was trying to use it up until I hit a point like, ‘I’ve done enough. I’ve tried enough things.’”  

So he hung up his football cleats, rugby boots, and bobsled speed suit, and set out to find a job in the business world. The problem - he didn’t know where to start. He didn’t even have a car at the time. He’d driven a BMW around for a year as part of a bobsled sponsorship, but now that the Olympics were over, he needed to find a different ride and a different job.

McGuffie reached out to his former coach, Bailiff, whom he calls one of the greatest men on the face of the earth. Bailiff had just invested in a Nola Poboys restaurant franchise in Houston with a man named James Greene, who owned a medical device company that sold spine and nerve implants for surgeries. Bailiff set him up for an impromptu interview with Greene in a Nola Poboys booth.

“He’d do anything for you,” McGuffie said. “There aren’t many people like him anymore, people that actually care about you regardless of the circumstances. He’ll always be there with open arms.”

McGuffie says that, on paper, he has the exact opposite characteristics of a salesperson. He could hardly talk to the media at Rice. Some thought he just always preferred to let his play, and the gargantuan reputation it created, speak for him. But Bailiff knew he was naturally shy, and talking to strangers made him extremely anxious. So why did Bailiff set him up for this job? Because he knew that eight years later, McGuffie would still be there, improving every day. 

“I’ve always been a hard worker,” McGuffie said. “I might not be the best at everything, but I will work harder than most.”

Then, his voice drops to a whisper, as if he’s afraid someone might overhear him boasting about working harder than they do.

 “I don’t want to say anybody because I’m sure there are people out there,” McGuffie said.

Except there’s no one out there like Sam McGuffie.