Web Video / UrinatingTree

This week, on Days of Our Tropers...

UrinatingTree (real name Steve Linkowski, and also goes by Schlasser or DSchlasser) is a video game reviewer and eventual sports critic who came around when The Angry Video Game Nerd was taking off.

He made video game reviews under the Fat Mann Judgeth character, covering games primarily on the Sega Genesis, and being overly angry about it. Ever since his review on Dark Castle for the Genesis, he had not updated his YouTube channel, and eventually, it went away, so his fans archived his reviews.

After disappearing from the internet for a while, UrinatingTree made a return around 2010 with a new account, and even managed to restore his old YouTube account. He attempted a new review series called "Generic Reviews", where he focused on creative writing and more self-deprecating humor. In 2016, he returned again with a small amount of gaming content. He returned for good in the middle of 2016 with a total revamp of his channel focusing on North American sports teams, primarily the NHL, NFL, and MLB, with occasional stuff about the NBA and lately, even some soccer here and there. These videos are usually split into the following series:

• Initial videos focusing on specific teams mostly fall into two camps, with the odd aversion here and there:
  • Lolcows in Sports: A series focusing on highlighting the, well, lowlights of sports teams.
  • A Legacy of Failure: A Spinoff of Lolcows in Sports, where the subject's primary shortcoming is their inability to win championships despite frequently qualifying to compete in them. None of the teams or coaches featured here have won even once despite their relatively long history (Tree's threshold is at least 40 years for a franchise and 10 years for a coach), although most of them have at least made it to the championship series.^note At least at the time of him making the videos; the Washington Capitals were the first to do it after that by winning their first Stanley Cup in 2018, almost a year and a half after he featured them. The St. Louis Blues, Washington Nationals, and Andy Reid have since followed. The Toronto Maple Leafs also broke the mold a bit with them winning the Stanley Cup in 1967, only to have pure turmoil and horrifying scandals follow them through since then. Tree has occasionally had to retitle some of these videos whenever the subject breaks their losing streak and actually wins a championship. A Congrats video (see below) usually follows, with Tree congratulating the subject on their success.
• The Haters Guide: An in-depth analysis video leading up to an important sports event such as the beginning of a season, playoffs, championship final, or draft.
• Congrats, (Team Name)!: A satirical Due to the Dead mini-video series mocking teams for a recent playoff loss, usually done by highlighting the most embarrassing play(s) of it, accompanied by a big "Conglaturation!". On occasion, sincere editions of these videos are made for teams who finally win a championship after a long drought. Several of these sincere videos are made for teams or coaches who starred in Legacy Of Failure videos, with Tree also changing the titles of the Legacy videos to reflect whenever the losing streak ended.
• This Week in Sportsball: A periodic series featuring recaps of games or trades that took place in the past week or month depending on the league being discussed. Having started life with weekly videos recapping the 2017-18 NFL Season, the series would later cover other leagues such as the NHL, MLB, and AAF.
  • Days Of Our Steelers: A Spinoff of This Week In Sportsball that presents Steelers games and the off-field drama surrounding the team as a parody of daytime soap operas,^note with the name itself evoking Days of Our Lives, with Tree providing overwrought narration. Featured the entire 2018 season, and then sporadically in 2019. He similarly presented the woes of the 2018 Jacksonville Jaguars as Sacksonville Abbey^note after Downton Abbey due to the Jaguars' ties to London, narrated in an extreme British accent a la a PBS presenter and those of the 2020 Dallas Cowboys as Dallas^note after... Dallas
  • The Greatest Game: An in-depth look at a (usually woeful) football game between two (usually) woeful teams.
• Revisiting...: These videos revisit previous subjects of his videos, following up on developments that took place after his initial video.
• In Which All Optimism Dies...: “Highlights” of incidents where Tree or his livestream partner FivePoints Vids lose hope for their teams’ futures during Tree’s live streams. The 2021 NFL Draft "Prepare to Die" edition adds the entire "Clickbait Sports" crew as all five bemoan their 1st Round picks.
• In 2021, Tree started dabbling in historic retrospectives that related to then-current sports topics:
  • The "Oil Crisis" duology focused on the Houston->Tennessee Oilers first as an example of a team Soap Opera similar to the aforementioned 2018 Steelers, then as an example of a relocating franchise similar to the Los Angeles Chargers.
  • "Heritage" looked at the Ottawa Senators' expansion draft (woes) and was released a few weeks before the Seattle Kraken expansion draft.
  • "Thrashed" examined the lifecycle of Atlanta hockey in light of the move of the Arizona Coyotes out of Glendale in 2022.^note News had broke in August 2021 that the long-lapsed Gila River Arena lease will be broken that year. Currently, the Coyotes plan on moving to Tempe at Arizona State University's hockey arena (which holds a maximum of 5,000 seats) for a few seasons, starting in the upcoming 2022-23 season, before planning and building a more permanent (and fitting) arena for them (and the university's basketball team) a few years later. Unfortunately, all three proposals to build the arena were rejected by the voters in May 2023, leaving the franchise's future in Arizona in doubt.
  • "The Trade", released during the Aaron Rodgers trade saga, discussed how the Dallas Cowboys' trade of Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings built the former's dynasty in the 90s.

Tree's YouTube channel is found here; his Twitter account here contains additional short thoughts about the sports world. He also co-hosts two weekly livestreams: one on Tuesdays with fellow YouTuber FivePoints Vids called The Dumpster Fire, located here, and the other on Thursdays with FivePoints, Tom Grossi, Brandon "ThatsGoodSports" Perna and Scooter Magruder called Clickbait Sports.

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"All things equal, I just think these tropes are too good right now":

Video Games (Fat Mann Judgeth (2000's), Half-Assed Theater, and Generic Reviews / Postmortems (2010-2018))

• Accentuate the Negative: Par of the course, but this has been subverted, twice. In the case of Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition, which he gave a positive review for (see Record Needle Scratch below), and another where he admits that Shaq Fu is not that bad of a game and even pointed out five other fighting games that are way worse. See Worst. Whatever. Ever! below.
• Affectionate Parody: His Half-Assed Theater of Snake's Revenge has Play It Bogart as the dictator, shooting voice clips from his review to show how much he loves the guy.
• Arch-Enemy: In his NES Ice Hockey Half-Assed Theater, the USSR team is this for Poland.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In the Half-Assed Theater of Punch-Out!!, Little Mac wanted to be shot out of the cannon. He ends up being defeated by Mike Tyson, mistaken for a child, then gets eaten and is implied to be cannon fodder out of Mike Tyson's ass.
• Berserk Button: Fat Mann really hated annoying sounds.
• Coming of Age Story: In his Half-Assed Theater of Punch-Out!!. Little Mac won once, and lost once, ending in Mike Tyson mistaking him for a child and eating him.
• Date Rape: Fat Mann's theory on how Batman Forever came to be, all played out thanks to The Movies (in a comedic fashion).
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Tree shoots himself after witnessing the ending to Sword of Sodan for the genesis. He gets better though.
  • The ending to Fantasia for Genesis.
    "I... ahhh... I... good night" [shoots himself]
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: After Dark Castle, Tree never did a single review under Fat Mann Judgeth, or bothered to mention what happened to him besides no longer liking him.
• invokedFranchise Original Sin: In his review for Fantasia for the Genesis, he mentions that Castle of Illusion had the same unintuitive Goomba Stomp mechanic, in which the player has to hold down while landing on an enemy to attack it. However, he retorts that the latter case was more "tolerable", since that game lacked any of the Fake Difficulty found in the former.
• Hypocritical Humor: During his speech about not raging against the game, the video justly flashes the text "LIAR!" as he talks.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Mike Tyson ended up eating Little Mac in the Half-Assed Theater of Punch-Out!!.
• Large Ham: The Fat Mann Judgeth character is all about this.
• Let's Play: Did exactly one, and immediately felt ashamed for it. It is actually not bad for a first attempt.
• Machinima:
  • In his Fat Mann Judgeth videos, he would employ The Movies when having any material outside the game review.
  • He did a series called Half-Assed Theater, involving him putting on performances with mostly video game footage.
• Not in My Contract: Tree begins his review of Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition by saying the game is awesome. Realizing what he had said, he goes to argue with an agent about his contact focusing only on bad games.
  "Fuck you! The contract is now null and void!"
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Tree made a YouTube channel called DSchlasser, where he did two game reviews under the title "FAIL" with a synthetic voice. It did not take long before his long time fans caught on to his act, leading to him admitting his return in a later video as he takes off the voice at the end. He would re-release his review on Superman 64 with the synthetic voice removed.
• Record Needle Scratch: He has quite a habit of employing this. A notable example is when he started off his review of Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition in a negative tone, before suddenly announcing that "this game is fucking awesome!" [record needle scratch]
• Rule of Three: After Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade (The Revenge) review on genesis, he established the Big Three. These being the three games he enjoyed when he was little, and now absolutely hate. Those being this, Superman, and Batman Forever.
• Self-Deprecation: Has a nasty habit of doing this to himself when doing videos outside Fat Mann Judgeth.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Fat Mann Judgeth does not sound like much of a name. But he certainly has an ego to go with it. Interestingly, it gets inverted big time when Tree came out of hiatus. By that time, he's got a sizable fanbase who is eager for more content, but he no longer sports a big ego. In fact, he takes every opportunity to berate himself.
• Split Personality: Tree revealed in his Superman review that Fat Mann Judgeth is basically a split personality. Of course, this is the only time he bothered to fight it. This gets dropped after his return from hiatus.
• Take That!:
  • Fat Mann had a closing disclaimer at the end of his Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade Sega Genesis review (the revenge), mocking the displeased viewers that they could have spent their times on doing more productive things in life instead of watching his videos.
  • He did a small jab after his only SNES game review of NHL Stanley Cup at people who disliked him employing yellow text.
• Take That Me: He pokes fun at himself every now and then. He cranks this up big time in his generic reviews.
• Unstoppable Rage:
  • The Fat Mann goes into an incredible fit of rage in a lot of the games he reviewed. Especially towards Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, Superman, and Batman Forever.
  • Tree discussed this at the end of his review of Shaq Fu.
    "I would rant about the poor fighting mechanics and the messed up plot and how Delphine Software and EA sold off for just a few extra sales and how the game rips off Street Fighter any chance it gets. But I'm not the type of guy who likes to scream into a microphone for no apparent reason other than to try to make himself all tough and angry for an audience that doesn't like getting their eardrums raped by an angry dispensable onslaught of incomprehensible capital. [Record Needle Scratch] Or am I?"
• Worst. Whatever. Ever!: Subverted. After reviewing Shaq Fu, Tree admitted that the game is not as bad as it's made out to be. He would then name five other fighting games that are much worse, counting Ballz, Rise of the Robots, Slaughter Sport (hilariously called Fatman in Japan), Heavy Nova and Batman Forever (technically a Beat 'em Up) among them.
• You Need to Get Laid: A running gag in the Half-Assed Theater of Snake's Revenge.
  "Snake, you really need to get laid."

Sports Videos (2016-present)

• Arc Words:
  • "They keep winning.": In any of Tree's videos mentioning the Vegas Golden Knights' debut season following the "Revisiting... the Vegas Golden Knights" video, Tree mentions a reason as to why the team will lose, followed by that phrase. (See It Will Never Catch On below for more information.)
  • "Close, but never close enough.": The motif of the Minnesota Wild franchise, as mentioned in the video "July 4, 2012: The Day That Killed The Minnesota Wild", due to the team's consistent shortcomings (especially by the time the Playoffs come around should they make it that far in a particular season) in their brief history.
  • "You're fucked": Usually said in his NBA videos, often given to teams who are doomed to fail thanks to chemistry issues, overhyped players, or falling victim to the lack of parity in the league.
  • "Bill O'Brien is a hack.": The whole premise of the video "Congrats, Texans! (2020)" is explaining how O'Brien's coaching incompetence led to the Houston Texans going from leading 24-0 against the Kansas City Chiefs to being brutalized 51-31 in the 2019-20 AFC Divisional Round game.
• And the Rest: He admitted he had little to no interest in basketball, the fourth of the "Big Four" of North American professional sports teams, presumably due to the NBA being the only major sports league without a team in his native Pittsburgh.
  • That has changed over time, beginning with his roast of the Philadelphia 76ers since they were so laughable, and he even tried to get himself interested in the 2017 NBA Finals. It didn't work, as it had a predictable result—as Tree points out, even the most interesting series are generally doomed to fail since the winner will only get schooled by the reigning dynasty team in a future round since the NBA is so lopsided in favor of only one or two teams.
  • In his "Congrats, Warriors!" video, Tree is jubilant that the NBA is "not fucked" anymore. This is because Golden State not only lost the NBA Finals to the Toronto Raptors but also lost several key players to injury. However, the NBA became "fucked" again the following season with the resurgence of the Los Angeles Lakers under LeBron James... who lost to the Phoenix Suns in the first round of the 2020-21 season's playoffs.
  • Tree was pleased in "The Haters Guide to the 2021 NBA Finals" that the Suns and the Milwaukee Bucks advanced to the Finals; his on-screen text even stated that it would be more entertaining than that year's Stanley Cup Finals.
    This might be one of the first times I've been able to say I've thoroughly enjoyed these playoffs. Things weren't predictable. We got intriguing matchups all around. It wasn't LeBron or Golden State mowing through everyone for the seventh year in a row. And all it took were major injuries to nearly every star player in the League. ... What a time to be alive!
• Anticlimax: Played for Laughs.
  • In his 100,000 Subscribers video. After twelve years as The Faceless, Tree finally does a face reveal in a brief stinger using a very low-definition camera while gently teasing his fans for thinking he'd ever do one in the first place.
  • In "A Yinzer in Jerryworld", while attending a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, he filmed two drunk Cowboys and Lions fans, hoping they'd get into a fight. The two actually meet face-to-face, only to hug it out and apologize, prompting Tree to start booing the two fans.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • Tree loves pointing out how this trope simply does not work in the sports world, and how rare it is for legendary players to become good coaches. Tree specifically points to how much damage was caused by Wayne Gretzky ^note 193-186-0-31 record and one playoff appearance in five seasons as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes and Ted Williams ^note 273-364 record and no pennants in four seasons as manager of the Washington Senators / Texas Rangers; Williams was eventually let go amid tensions with his players., arguably the greatest players in their respective sports, during their coaching stints.
  • This even extends to behind-the-bench staff switching positions, such as beloved NBA coach Phil Jackson failing as a general manager for the New York Knicks.
• Atomic F-Bomb: Unleashes one of these in "This Week In Sportsball: NHL Free Agency Edition" after learning John Tavares has defected from the New York Islanders.
• Basement-Dweller: His Twitter account lists his location as "Yinzer Basement". Said basement has featured in the background of both his solo live streams,^note  although both also featured him moving to the upstairs living room, which features a wall full of crosses and watermelon paintings, which became a source of humor in its own right including the time where he ate a Pitts-Burger^note he's previously referred to Primanti Brothers, a famous Pittsburgh restaurant whose signature dish is the Pitts-Burger, as "overrated pig-slop" while listening to the Steelers' rally song, "Here We Go, Steelers". He's also revealed that the basement is his sister's, as he lives with her.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: "Canucked" says this in hindsight of the Vancouver Canucks firing GM Jim Benning in December 2021. While they only made the playoffs twice during his eight-season tenure, they went off a cliff after his firing.
• Berserk Button:
  • Teams demanding taxpayer-funded stadiums and threatening relocation.
  • Whenever his hometown teams, (the Penguins, Pirates, and especially the Steelers) do something stupid.
  • Any team that is absolutely loaded with talent (the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Tampa Bay Lightning prior to 2020) that consistently fails to live up to its potential.
  • Referee's injecting themselves into the game, either because of a bad call or bad rule.
  • The best example that combines three of the four listed was in the 2017 matchup between the Steelers and Patriots which saw the Steelers seemingly score a go ahead touchdown with under a minute left, only for it to be wiped out by the unclear definition of what constitutes a catch.^note  Just a year later the cavate that nullified the catch was taken out. Tree goes nuts at first, but after a moment gathers himself because the Steelers can still tie the game with a field goal, only to watch as they literally throw the game away with an interception, causing Tree to go off the deep end.
• Big "NO!": This classic from "This Week in Sportsball: NFL Week Seven Edition":
  Tree: Oh, what's this? The Cleveland Browns getting their hearts broken in OT after their trainwreck of a QB situation ravages them? Meh, I'm not phased. This probably doesn't even break their Top 50 in worst losses since the return-
  (Bone Breaking sound effect and scream of pain)
  Headline: Joe Thomas will miss the rest of the season with left triceps tear
  (Taps begins to play)
  Tree: (In the background) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: From "This Week In Sportsball: NFL Week Five Edition", over footage of former Miami Dolphins O-line coach Chris Foerster snorting cocaine:
  Is this advertiser-friendly enough, YouTube?
• Blatant Lies: At the start of "The Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NHL Playoffs", Tree expresses hope that there aren't an excessive number of overtimes in this year's edition. Those who have been around his channel for a while already know that this is a lie. For newer viewers, the following caption pops up:
  The hell am I kidding? I want more of it.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • "The Detroit Red Wings: Decline and Fall of an Empire" was bleak all around, but the closing arguments really made the bottom fall out.
    Tree: Nobody is questioning Ken Holland's legacy; regardless of his horrible stretch, he will still go down as one of the best GM's of the mid-2000s. In fact, I find Holland to be more of a tragic figure. To me, he is Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, a former god who has sacrificed everything he has known and loved to try and maintain the fires of his past glory in the empire. He may have been egotistical in refusing to move aside, but that's because he felt he could still remain on top. He was grossly mistaken. This is the harshest lesson of all: we all have an expiration date. One day, the world will pass us by, and we shall become obsolete and irrelevant. Different ideas and theories will come along, and unless you can adapt at rapid speed, you will die. No matter how good or important a person is, we are all replaceable cogs in the machine. What happens when you don't adapt? You become the Red Wings.
  • "The Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NBA Season" is filled with this, describing 28 out of 30 teams with some variant of "You're fucked".^note He says the Cavaliers are pretty much going to be fucked since he speculates that LeBron would leave the team after the season, completely destroying all of their championship hopes and dreams. For now, though, he might, might, help them get to the top. His speculation proves correct; after the Cavaliers were swept by the Warriors in the finals, LeBron signed with the Lakers in free agency.
  • "Congrats, NFL!" takes aim at the league for its inconsistent and often poor officiating, resulting in the refereeing decisions often contributing heavily to the outcomes of games.
  Tree: (via on-screen captions) The refball has always been bad. But never like this. It's now nearly every week with repeated incompetence. Player safety? What the fuck is that? … These penalties and non-calls are what people think of when they think of the shield. And it's your own goddamn fault for it. The rules are too vague. Too many judgment calls. The refs have no idea what to call or not call because everyone's judgment differs. We knew it was going to irreparably ruin the outcome of a game. But in no way did we think it would be like this. … The NFL completely deserves this controversy. This is what you get for inconsistent rule enforcement. All hail refball.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Essentially, his definition for what qualifies as a "lolcow" boils down to "a person or group of people that can be consistently laughed at for actions that they take, despite not trying to be funny". Chew Toys can qualify for lolcow status if their incompetence is sufficiently amusing, and especially if the team brought it on themselves.
  • Tree himself can be this when it comes to the blunders made by Pittsburgh sports teams. His livestream of the 2021 playoff game that saw the Steelers eliminated by the Browns is textbook Sanity Slippage.
• Call-Back
  • Invoked in "The Vancouver Canucks: Professional Hockey's Lolcow"; Tree mocked Vancouver's Fan Dumb by claiming that they would gladly kill every homeless person in the city if that's what it took to get the Vegas Golden Knights to sign base-breaking defenseman Luca Sbisa in the expansion draft. Later on, in "The Haters Guide to the Vegas Golden Knights Expansion Draft", the Knights do end up signing Spisa, and Tree congratulates Vancouver on getting rid of him without having to kill any homeless people.
  • In the 2017 NFL Draft recap he refers to New York Jets, Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars as "buttfumble", "walking mediocrity" and "forgotten lolcow" respectively. These are also the titles of these teams' lolcow videos.
  • When talking about the Pirates in "The Haters Guide to the 2017 MLB Season - All-Star Edition" after MLB's All-Star break, he mentioned Starling Marte being a fucking idiot, Jameson Taillon getting cancer, and alluded to trading for "financial flexibility".
  • While talking about the Pittsburgh Steelers in The Pittsburgh Steelers: Professional Football's Pharisee, he nods back to his memetic statement "THE FUCKING PENGUINS" when talking about how Pittsburgh always seems to get put out of the playoffs by "THE FUCKING PATRIOTS".
  • When he got to the Carolina Hurricanes in his "Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NHL season" video, he covered them in the same style as his "Brass Bonanza" video about them.
  • He did something similar to the Mets in "The Haters Guide to the 2018 MLB Season", covering them in the same style as in "The New York Mets: Professional Baseball's Rotting Apple". He did it to them again when they "won" Lolcow of the Month in "This Week In Sportsball: MLB In May Edition".
  • Week 17 of This Week in Sportsball features the return of YouTuber EatDatPussy445 from the Philadelphia Eagles video, in response to their performance after losing Carson Wentz. He also shows EDP briefly in his "Congrats, Patriots!" to depict EDP's reaction to the Eagles winning the Super Bowl at long last.
  • When the Capitals finally won a Stanley Cup, Tree remarked, "One of hockey's most illustrious legacies of failure has been broken." This win by the longsuffering team came only a year and a half after he'd given them an episode of Legacy of Failure, and marks the first time a team he profiled as having a Legacy of Failure actually won a championship title.
  • Near the end of "The Haters Guide to the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals", Tree calls back to a Running Gag from "The St. Louis Blues: A Legacy Of Failure" by noting that both the Capitals and Golden Knights have several former Blues players on their rosters, meaning the situation of ex-Blues personnel winning a Cup with another team is about to repeat itself yet again. "This Week In Sportsball: NHL Free Agency Edition" follows up on this by showing T.J. Oshie's lap with the Cup in Caps colors, while noting in a caption that Lars Eller and Todd Reirden were also with Washington—Eller on the ice, Reirden in the coaching staff.
  • When he slips out of character for a moment to rant about the Steelers defense in "Days Of Our Steelers - Episode 4: Nevermore", the background music switches from generic soap opera music to the Doom (2016) track "Welcome to Hell", which was used prominently in "Congrats, Steelers!". A similar lapse in "Episode Seven: The Eternal Factory of Sadness", in which he rants about the Special Teams gaffing on a free-kick from a safety, switches the BGM to "BFG Division", which also featured prominently in "Congrats, Steelers!".
  • "The Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NBA Season" describes most of the teams with some variant of "You're fucked" about how the Golden State Warriors are The Juggernaut of the league. "The Haters Guide to the 2018/19 NBA Season" does the same thing, with every team but the Warriors getting the same message. It ends with a final call for "somebody — anybody — just beat the Warriors!"^note The Toronto Raptors obliged.
  • In Week 15 of the 2017 season, when it looks like the Steelers will beat the Patriots, Tree puts "Yinzer Mode Activated" on-screen, complete with sirens and red overlay effects, along with screaming in jubilation with an exaggerated Pittsburgh accent. However, he stops when a crucial touchdown catch was ruled an incomplete pass, causing the Steelers to lose the game. The following season, the Steelers beat the Patriots in the same week, prompting Tree to activate "Yinzer Mode" again, this time sincerely.
  • When introducing the Washington Nationals in "The Haters Guide to the 2019 World Series", he uses an extended clip of one of the alarm clock scenes from Groundhog Day, with Phil having a Nats logo superimposed over his face as he smashes said alarm clock. The BGM of their segment is also the second half of the Cyberdemon boss theme from Doom (2016), which previously played over the 2010s portion of their "Legacy of Failure" video.
• Catchphrase: A few of his commonly used descriptors:
  • "Congratulations, your team STILL can't make it past the second round!!"
  • "A king's ransom"—describing incredibly unbalanced trades (one team trading several other players/draft picks/other assets for one specific player)
  • "prolapsing all over the [field]"—spectacular collapses
  • "hot mess" and "dumpster fire"—bad teams and/or players with little hope of improving.
  • "clown/shit show"—hopelessly bad teams and/or players
  • "the glorious tank"—teams that are "tanking", deliberately doing poorly to try and get a top draft pick allocation (complete with tanks rolling across the screen)
  • "Tank Bowl"—NFL games between two tanking teams, in which the goal of each team is to lose and improve their draft pick. Comes with its own intro, which shows CGI tanks rolling over in front of footage of actual tanks, while the super "Tank Bowl [Roman Numeral]" floats across the screen, before settling in at the top center and team logos flying into the bottom half while explosions go off.
  • "albatross contract"—an expensive or long-lasting contract for an underperforming player.
  • Surprising displays of competence and playoff contention—particularly from a bottom-tier team—will inevitably draw references to sacrificing "fattened calves/goats", or allusions to black magic (necromancy, sorcery, among others). Inverted in "Congrats, Lightning!":
    Tree: How does one go about not scoring a goal in over two and a half games? What kind of black magic must I conjure for such ineptitude? I wish to use it against my enemies.
  • "the [sport] gods"—random factors or unpredictable events that cause a team to lose. Also presented as an invisible malevolent entity that is constantly keeping specific teams down for the sake of seeing them suffer.
  "The Football Gods show no mercy. Amen."
  • "Something called a..."—a relatively unknown player, who may or may not have a ridiculous sounding, hard-to-pronounce name.
  • "bitch-slapped/brought back to reality"—When a mediocre team makes a good decision, gets a surprising victory or has a good run (especially in the playoffs), only to lose a big game or regress back to the mean not long after.
  • "Fuck you, Spanos."—a reference to Los Angeles Chargers owner Dean Spanos, who is widely hated for moving the team from San Diego for less-than-ideal reasons.
  • "refball"—a nicknamed bestowed to the questionable and controversial officiating of the NFL.
  • "high-end talent"—referring to any notable big-name player on a team that would be struggling without them. Often treated as an Instant-Win Condition due to their ability to bail out underperforming teams at the last second.
• Caustic Critic: Part of the fun of the videos is listening to Tree's frustration and disgust at the ineptitude he sees in the sports world.
• Censored for Comedy: In "A Yinzer At Spring Training: Tales of Clumsiness and Clickbait", the Houston Astros are referred to as "a certain team that will not be named." Whenever the Astros are mentioned by name, it's bleeped out, along with the caption "*FORBIDDEN TEAM" appearing on the screen. This was done in response to the Astros' sign-stealing scandal, where the team cheated throughout their World Series run.
  • For less controversial reasons, his MLB videos often have the Minnesota Twins' logo edited to literally remove the "win" from their nickname, looking like "T___s" instead. This is to reference their poor record in playoff series, often being swept out in doing so.
• Comically Missing the Point: Toward the end of "The Edmonton Oilers: Professional Hockey's Al Bundy", he suggests tongue in cheek that the Oilers put up a banner celebrating their "Offseason Championship" in 2017 while ribbing them for being stuck in the past. One Record Needle Scratch later, and the video cuts to the Oilers putting up a banner celebrating the 1984-85 squad winning an internet poll while Gretzky and a number of other players from that team look on. While the on-screen captions concede that it was an officially sanctioned NHL poll, it also notes the last thing anyone needed was "another 80's circle-jerk".
• Conspiracy Theorist: He identifies an entire sect of Pirates fanbase as being these. Their pet theory? That team owner Bob Nutting is a cheapass.
• Content Warning:
  • Parodied with the text summaries for the "Legacy of Failure" series:
  TRIGGER WARNING: The following video contains scenes that may cause horrible pain for [video subject's] fans and/or vicarious joy for division rivals.
  • Also parodied in "The Brooklyn Nets: A Lolcow in Three Acts":
  The following video contains scenes of disastrous personnel decisions and terrible basketball Viewer discretion is advised
  • The thumbnails for "Congrats, Falcons 2017", "Andy Reid, a Legacy of Failure", and "Congrats, Lightning 2019" all have "Chocking Hazard" labels.
• Cringe Comedy: The footage of YouTube user and Philadelphia Eagles fan EatDatPussy445 in his video on the Eagles.
• Crossover: He will frequently feature pieces from FivePointVids, That's Good Sports, and other YT sports commentators as well, usually when they want to lambaste their own teams, and vice versa.
• Damned by Faint Praise: In "The New York Jets - Professional Football's Buttfumble", Tree says that Joe Namath is the greatest Jets quarterback of all time — literally seconds after calling him one of the most overrated.^note Namath's entry on this site's page for the NFL notes that he's the only QB to enter the Hall of Fame with more interceptions than touchdowns
• Deal with the Devil: In "Houston: The City That Sold Its Soul", Tree paints the city of Houston as someone who made a deal with a tempting succubus who gave them a World Series title in 2017, only to have their fortunes keep getting worse as payment.
• Despair Event Horizon: Crossed it while talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates, as the two people he tried to heap praise on while still trying to defend the team turned, Starling Marte got himself an 80+ game suspension for using PEDs, and Jameson Taillon had to undergo surgery for cancer. It became more serious when he revisited the team seven months later, with Tree giving up any hopes he has for the team succeeding for the foreseeable future.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Near the end of "The Haters Guide to the 2021 NBA Finals", the on-sreen text declared that Milwaukee vs Phoenix would be a "more entertaining" matchup than the 2021 Stanley Cup Finals^note Montreal vs Defending Champ Tampa Bay, followed by the trope phrase.^note Tampa won the Cup in 5 games, Milwaukee won the Finals in 6.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Managerial staff who are fired from their jobs are described with such descriptors as "shown the guillotine", "taken out back and shot", and others. Throwing people into various bodies of water for various reasons also crops up.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: A non-sexual example. "The Detroit Red Wings: Decline and Fall of an Empire" frames the decline of the Red Wings in tropes that make one think of the Roman Empire, without actually saying so outright. Of course, the background music from Rome: Total War is a dead giveaway.
• Dramatic Thunder: Parodied in "The Chicago Bears: The NFL's Legacy Lolcow" when talking about the family that owns the Bears...The McCaskeys!
  (Musical Sting and Dramatic Thunder)
  Tree: I don't know why it keeps doing that...
• Drowning My Sorrows: He frequently makes jokes about teams that lose (especially in the playoffs) needing copious amounts of alcohol to numb the pain and misery of a loss.
• Due to the Dead
  • Parodied with the "Congrats, [team name]!" miniseries, where a team is mocked for a big mistake that causes them to lose a championship or be eliminated from the playoffs. Subverted with "Congrats, Astros!", whose "Congrats!" video is a sincere tribute to the team's first World Series win, and then again with the 2018 edition of "Congrats, Capitals!", which pays tribute to Washington's first Stanley Cup win. In the latter, he specifically notes that their legacy is no longer one of failure.
  • The above series occasionally plays it straight (or does a more gentle mocking) if a team's playoff exit was tragic or heartbreaking.
  • Played straight in the 2018 "This Week in Sportsball" videos, as he plays tolling bells to honor the deaths of Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen, San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers owner Alex Spanos (even saying "There will be no fucking of Spanos today."^note Stressing that Dean Spanos, Alex's son, was the target of his anger about moving the Chargers to L.A.), and Houston Texans owner Bob McNair.
  • Once again, played straight in "The Hater's Guide to the 2019 MLB Season: AL All-Star Edition" after the death of Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs. Tree takes a moment to reflect on his death and express his condolences to the team.
  • And played straight once again in "The Hater's Guide to the 2021/22 NHL Season" to commemorate the death of Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Matiss Kivlenieks in a fireworks accident, saving others at the celebration. As with Skaggs, Tree reflects on his death, and wishes that he lives on in his teammate's newborn son.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Two of the first three "Congrats" videos, "Congrats, Chargers!" and "Congrats, Raiders!", were made for teams who got ripped from their long time homes and transplanted to cities that didn't really want them. These videos, as well as "Congrats, Falcons!", also saw Tree playing the parts of a sportscaster duo named Bill and John as they roasted the teams in question as well as the NFL for facilitating these messes. When the "Congrats!" series returned during the 2017 NHL Playoffs, it was more or less in its current form, and "Bill and John" have only reappeared thrice—"Congrats, Capitals! (2017)", "Congrats, UrinatingTree!" and "Congrats, Republicans!".
  • In earlier videos, his delivery is slower and a little more morose than the more upbeat and quick-talking tone he uses nowadays.
• The Empire:
  • He often compares the Patriots to the Galactic Empire of Star Wars fame due to their domination of the AFC since the turn of the Millenium. Tom Brady is likewise compared to either Darth Vader or the Death Star, and Bill Belichick is compared with Emperor Palpatine.^note Though he also "awarded" Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones with that moniker in his Lolcow video.
  • The Detroit Red Wings of the late 1990s and the first decade in the 2000s are compared to the Roman Empire by UT, considering their consistency in their success season after season during this time, never missing the playoffs and winning several Stanley Cup Championships. The real kicker, though, is his documenting the team's slow but inexorable decline as management kept making moves for one last Cup run even as the team's core got old and left, until it finally bottomed out in the latter half of the 2010s.
• Epic Fail: His video on the 1992 Ottawa Senators paints the team's expansion draft this way. First, the team got all of their data on a laptop, but then the laptop's battery died. When they tried to plug it in to charge the battery, the outlet at their table wouldn't work. They then had to pull players either from memory or at random. Three times they tried this, they ended up picking a player that was ineligible, forcing them to go back to their table and start over. And the end result of all of this? One of the worst win-loss records in NHL history.
• Every Year They Fizzle Out: "A Legacy of Failure" videos are exclusively about these kinds of teams. Rather than focus on a team that used to have success but is currently failing, "Legacy" videos are about teams who have never won their league's respective championship. Quite often, these teams will come close to winning, but never actually win. The videos also frequently bring up managerial incompetence or a sudden decline in quality.
  • The Legacy of Failure video on the Maple Leafs takes a different track. It starts with Toronto winning the Stanley Cup in 1967, but then goes on to show the level of ineptitude by the team and its ownership since that win, titled "A Half-Century of Failure".
• Evil Versus Evil: His opinion regarding the Washington Redskins name controversy. Tree calls it a fight between people who are picking battles that aren't theirs to fight; i.e. hijacking a First Nations/Native American cause for their own benefit, and a corrupt billionaire who sues his critics, scams his consumer base, and regularly ignores the safety of his own players.
• Executive Meddling: A common issue with teams featured in Lolcow videos.
  • Jimmy Haslam bought the Cleveland Browns with the intent of "going in guns-a-blazing and chang[ing] everything." Tree then mentions that since he's been there (2012), he's fired either a coach, GM, or both nearly every year.
  • "The Florida Panthers: Professional Hockey's Analytical Gongshow" detailed how their ownership played musical chairs with management, the scouting staff, coaches and the roster over the course of a year, thus thoroughly jack-knifing their identity...in response to the team making the playoffs for just the second time since 2000. The fact that their loss in the first round of the 2016 playoffs was mainly caused by "playoff puck luck and shitty officiating" seems to have been lost on them.
• Fan Disillusionment:
  • So it was obvious that Pittsburgh teams weren't immune from his criticism, but "The Pittsburgh Steelers: Professional Football's Pharisee" shows you just how much he's had it with the town's NFL franchise. His "Congrats, Steelers" video after their 2018 Divisional loss to the Jaguars has him come back for seconds: rather than mock the team with "Conglaturation!" snark, Tree takes the entire team and its fanbase to task in a profanity-filled rant at head coach Mike Tomlin, former offensive coordinator Todd Haley, former free safety Mike Mitchell, and the fanbase in general for being arrogant enough to think the Jaguars weren't going to be a challenge. And then there's the (supposed) 2018 Season Finale of Days of Our Steelers: "Judgement Day"...
    If you'll excuse me, I have to go grind my axe.
  • He's identified the San Jose Sharks as his favorite team from outside the Pittsburgh area. He's also questioned that decision in some of his videos due to their choking tendencies in the playoffs, which culminated in their own "A Legacy Of Failure" installment in May 2018.
• Fan Hater:
  • If Tree specifically mentions a fanbase, it's usually because he hates them. Though his primary whipping boys are actual franchises, in some cases he tends to lump their fans in as well, even though fanbases aren't actually part of sports franchises.
  • Tree holds a special contempt for Pittsburgh Steelers fans, since he lives in Pittsburgh and is frequently annoyed by "yinzers", whom Tree says are making the city look bad through their obnoxious attitudes.
• Flat "What": "Well then." Usually comes with being Instantly Proven Wrong.
• For Want Of A Nail: Among the Jets' many buttfumbles is injuring Drew Bledsoe, which allowed Tom Brady to start for the Patriots, show his potential, and come to dominate the AFC (and more importantly, the AFC East, turning the Pats-Jets rivalry into a rather one-sided one).
• Foregone Conclusion: Tree's biggest problem with NBA is lack of parity between teams, which makes the playoffs predictable. "The Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NBA Season" treats it as inevitable that the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers will face each other in the NBA Finals for what would be the fourth year in a row. Tellingly, this was the first time he correctly predicted both halves of a championship matchup beforehand.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In "The Haters Guide to the 2018 NHL Playoffs", Tree taunted the San Jose Sharks by saying he had "something special" ready to go for "when (not if)" they choked in that year's playoffs. After they got taken out by the Vegas Golden Knights in the second round, he fired off "The San Jose Sharks: A Legacy of Failure", despite the Sharks not meeting the time requirement on their own.^note He justified it by arguing the Sharks are not the area's first NHL team; in fact, NHL hockey in the area has a history running all the way back to the 1967 expansion. If anything, since the NHL put a team there, it's had NHL hockey for longer than it hasn't had NHL hockey. So really, the Sharks are just following in the footsteps of their forefathers by failing in the postseason, a Bay Area hockey tradition since 1967.
  • For the Week 11 edition of the 2020 NFL season's "This Week In Sportsball", UT describes the Baltimore Ravens as looking "highly sus". While the term is used with respect to Baltimore not looking as strong as their stats or roster talent says they should, it's also a hint for what he decided to do for depicting teams that get eliminated from playoff contention for this season — as Among Us players who got voted off and are Thrown Out the Airlock while "There are X imposters remaining" is typed out on screen (where X is how many more teams need to be eliminated before all playoff spots are claimed). The New York Jets are the first imposters when they are shown losing to the Los Angeles Chargers and get chucked into outer space.
• Forgettable Character: The Arizona Cardinals are a Forgettable Team, according to Tree. While other bottom-of-the-league teams like the Browns elicit sympathy and become underdogs for their failures, nobody really cares about the Cardinals (unless they lose).
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Most videos in the series follow a general format, but a few are more experimental:
  • "Dan Snyder: Professional Football's Stubborn Lolcow" uses the same formula but focuses on an owner rather than a team. This approach gets repeated for "Jerry Jones: Professional Football's Palpatine".
  • "Re: The DeMarcus Cousins Trade" is a follow-up video after DeMarcus Cousins was traded from the Sacramento Kings literally hours after Tree's first lolcow video about the Kings went online.invoked
  • "The Carolina Hurricanes: A Brass Bonanza" compresses all the usual research into a 90-second fake ad where a Large-Ham Announcer asks "for the love of God, please come to our games!"^note The team was in the middle of a decade away from the playoffs, resulting in dwindling attendance - the video came out during their lowest point.
  • "The Minnesota Vikings: A Legacy of Failure" has Tree Enraged by Idiocy and driven to drink over the awfulness of the Minnesota Vikings franchise rather than simply laughing at them. This ended up being popular enough to make "Legacy of Failure" a regular segment for other teams with similar reputations.
  • "Happy Bobby Bonilla Day!" celebrates a legendarily poor contract signing made by the New York Mets in 1999.
  • "The San Francisco Giants: A Tale of Two Years" is a three-minute Juxtaposition Gag about how the Giants seem to consistently alternate between championship-worthy seasons and awful seasons.
  • "Mayweather vs. McGregor: Professional Boxing's Knockout Blow" borders on being this by his standards (and own admission) as he takes the Mayweather/McGregor fight to task for its unbelievable impending Hype Backlash, its $100 pay-per-view price tag, and generally pointing out that this is, basically, boxing's last gasp at relevance.
  • "Congrats, Astros!" is Tree's first "Congrats!" video that is not a satirical Due to the Dead. It is instead a tribute montage, first recounting the team's history of failure, then concluding it with the last out that gave the Houston team its first World Series victory after 55 years. While other Congrats videos would end with a "Conglaturation!" to the failing team, a genuine "Congratulations!" was given to the Astros. He repeats this with the video "Congrats, Capitals!", for the 2018 Washington Capitals team, and with "Congrats, Blues!" for the 2019 St. Louis Blues when they won their first Stanley Cup championships after years of failure.
  • Much like the Dan Snyder video above, Andy Reid: A Legacy of Failure focuses on one man—former Eagles and current Chiefs head coach Andy Reid. Also like that video, the approach would be repeated with current Minnesota Wild and former Capitals/Ducks head coach Bruce Boudreau.
  • "Revisiting... the Vegas Golden Knights" is pretty much Tree admitting he was wrong about the new Las Vegas team. Tree says that the Golden Knights set the bar for an expansion franchise by (at the time) coming out of nowhere to take first place in their conference in the team's first year of existence, all without a true "superstar" on the team. Similarly to the Vikings Legacy of Failure video, this was popular enough to turn into a semi-regular series, chronicling teams whose seasons have gone vastly different than expected.
  • "Taking the Piss on the 2018 World Cup" is Tree's rundown of that year's World Cup in the style of Haters Guide or This Week in Sportsball but filed under neither due to him admitting being a noob when comes to that football.
  • "A Yinzer in Jerryworld: How I Stopped Worrying and Fell in Love With the Vlog" is a vlog covering Tree's Seatgeek-sponsored trip to Dallas with fellow sports YouTubers, KTO, FlemoRaps and frequent collaborator and bald Dumpster Fire co-host, FivePointsVids among others. It had Tree (trying) to do the combine and a flag football game at the Cowboys' practice facility in Frisco and the crew watching the Lions vs. Cowboys game at AT&T Stadium with live commentary.
  • "Congrats, NFL!" takes the place of the usual snark at the defeated teams in the conference championships, the Saints and the Chiefs, as both teams lost at least partly due to controversial officiating.^note  The Saints had to settle for a field goal on what they expected to be their final drive after the referees waved off a helmet-to-helmet foul by Nickell Robey-Coleman against Tommylee Lewis on a third down; the Rams drove back to kick a field goal of their own and tie the score, then won in overtime. On the opposite side of the coin, the Chiefs were hit with a highly specious pass interference penalty halfway through the fourth quarter when Chris Jones hit Tom Brady on the shoulder; the resulting penalty helped the Patriots drive for a touchdown to take a 24-21 lead, and they also ultimately won in overtime. Instead, Tree directs his anger at the NFL for their vaguely defined and inconsistently applied rules on pass interference and roughing the passer.
  • Much like the "Congrats, Astros!" example mentioned above, "Buffalo Bills vs Kansas City Chiefs (January 23, 2022) - The Greatest (Play-Off) Game was the first "Greatest Game" video that was not satirical and instead we see Tree genuinely giving praise to the match. This is also something that he lampshades right at the beginning of the video.
  Tree: Normally I tend to go for the more tongue-in-cheek games that are so terrible that they're worthy of song, but this one? This is a contest we'll be talking about for a very long time to come, this was true greatness.
  • "July 4, 2012: The Day That Killed The Minnesota Wild" takes an critical look at the Wild's signings of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter. Tree blames the signings for the Wild's inability to get past the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs; due to the two players' 13-year, $98 million contracts, the Wild were unable to deal for others to turn the team from a playoff team to a true championship contender, and had to give up their young prospects to stay under the salary cap.
  • "Revisiting the 2016 NHL Free Agent Class" sees Tree analyzing the free agent signings from the 2016 NHL season. Tree sees the class as being especially underachieving, with many signings declining in performance or suffering personal health issues, and also notes the massive contracts given to the players.
  • "How to Destroy a Franchise 101: Starring the Anaheim Ducks" places Tree as a headmaster for a lecture on the Ducks' woes.
  • "Philosophical Musings on the 2019 NHL Trade Deadline" is a meditative reflection on the trades of the 2019 NHL Trade Deadline, as a result of Tree not being happy with the script for a regular This Week in Sportsball video.
  • "The Alliance of American Football: A Postmortem" is an autopsy of what had gone so wrong with the AAF that it ran out of money and suspended operations in the middle of its inaugural season.
  • "How To Destroy A Career 101: Starring Martavis Bryant" again shows Tree as a schoolmaster discussing the decline of the former Steelers and Raiders WR.
  • "A Message From The Company" spoofs the "social awareness" advertisements that are put out by major corporations, especially around controversial topics. Tree mixes his own brand of snark, generic placeholders for specific actions or controversies, and common phrases used in such advertisements.
  • "The Death of the Regional Sports Network" is an analysis of the sudden crash of RSN networks with the impending bankruptcies of Bally Sports and AT&T Sportsnet in 2023; how it will impact MLB, NBA, and NHL;^note Not so much NFL and MLS; NFL had already been broadcast nationally for decades, and MLS began a global format with Apple's MLS Season Pass in 2023. and how well each league is equipped to handle it.
• Franchise Original Sin: Invoked in his Legacy of Failure video for the Atlanta Falcons, where Tree points out that the Falcons have been blowing halftime leads during the postseason long before Super Bowl LI, dating back to the 1978 NFC Divisional Playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The non-standard error messages in "Danica Patrick: Professional Racing's Blue Screen of Death", which become more elaborate every time the video crashes culminating in a Blue Screen of Death.
  • The Haters' Guide to the 2017/18 NHL Season Debriefing is basically a series of short-season autopsies of teams who failed to make the playoffs. Among them are the Detroit Red Wings, or if you managed to ignore the jittery team logo and read the title text, the Detroit Dead Things.
  • The Haters' Guide to the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals has two of these: The Anaheim Ducks are introduced as the "Roasted Anaheim Ducks" as a Call-Back to "Congrats, Ducks! (2018)", and the Tampa Bay Lightning are referred to as the "Fucking Useless Lightning".
• From Bad to Worse: The Cleveland Browns video has perhaps the shining example of this.
  Tree: But it's only one season, the football gods can't shit on them every single year! [Beat] Oh, boy, were we all wrong...
• Fun with Acronyms: "World Famous Jameis' Bakery" backronyms "Fraud" and "Bust" into "Foundation of Residually Assaulted Uber Drivers" and "Battalion of Unloved Sports Teams", respectively.
• Get Out!: Portrays himself screaming this at Bruce Boudreau when he was fired as the coach of the Anaheim Ducks.
  Tree: Get out. Get out! Did I stutter, you moribund marshmallow?! OUT!!!
  • Then, at the end of the same episode, after tallying up Boudreau's "score":
  Tree: Survey says!
  BBQ Rating: ATOMIC
  George Carlin: Get the fuck outta here!
  • Gives one to Pirates closer Felipe Vazquez (nee Rivero) following his arrest for attempting to have sex with a minor.
  Tree: To hell with the trade value, you go to jail now. GET THE FUCK TO JAIL!!! YOU SICK FUCK!!!!!
• Gone Horribly Right: From the "Revisiting... the 76ers" video, this is his opinion on "The Process" as outlined in the original 76ers Lolcow video: yes, the 76ers are finally a playoffs-worthy team. However, said success is inspiring a sizable portion of the NBA to attempt to tank to replicate the success, which isn't doing the parity problems any favors.
• Gratuitous German: His Dolphins-Chiefs recap from "This Week in Sportsball: NFL Week Nine Edition (2023)" is done entirely in German, as the game was played in Frankfurt. The same happened with his Colts-Patriots recap the following week.
• Green-Eyed Monster: His opinion on why the Flames owners are pushing so hard for a new stadium, and for the public funds that would allow them to build it without having to invest their own money, is that they're jealous of the Oilers getting their new stadium on Edmonton's dime and want to in some way one-up them (something they were unable to do during the Oilers' run of championships in the '80s). He points out that Plan A (dubbed "CalgaryNext") would also include an attached football stadium and secondary facilities, and even Plan B (a standalone hockey arena) still requires them to find a plot of vacant land to realize it, which led to them buying a plot of contaminated riverfront property and naively attempting to draw in the successor companies of the factory that used to be there to clean up their pollution.^note  specifically, creosote
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: In his "Haters Guide to the 2017 NBA Finals", he implied the city of Washington, DC was locked in one of these, with the Nationals, Capitals, and the Wizards all failing in their respective playoffs. The Nationals get a personal version after another NLDS elimination in 2017: the "Conglaturation" was presented in a similar fashion as the Wizards segment of the above video, this time replaying each of the last four instances the Nationals made it to the playoffs, ending up losing in the divisional round of every single one. He also used the same clip in his NFL Week 11 video as the Redskins blew a 15-point lead with less than three minutes remaining against the Saints and proceeded to lose in overtime.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Episode Seven of Days of Our Steelers moves on to the firing of Hue Jackson after talking about the Steelers' victory over the Browns.
• Hanlon's Razor:
  • Invoked by Tree in "The Toronto Maple Leafs: A Half-Century of Failure" when discussing the fact that the referees missed an obvious high-stick by the Los Angeles Kings' Wayne Gretzky on Maple Leaf Doug Gilmour. A segment of Toronto fans have claimed a fix was in at the behest of the NHL to prevent an all-Canadian Stanley Cup Finals since Montreal had already made it. Tree's response was that the most likely thing that happened was just the officials doing a poor job.
  • Averted repeatedly in "The Haters Guide to the 2020 NBA Finals", where he:
    • Accuses the referees of rigging game six of the Raptors-Celtics series to guarantee a game seven.
    • Laughs at the Denver Nuggets for believing they would be "allowed" past the Los Angeles Lakers, while showing footage of referees persistently ignoring blatant fouls by the Lakers and repeatedly calling nebulous contact by the Nuggets to put L.A. on thd free throw line.
    • Accuses the referees of trying to rig the Eastern Conference Finals for the Celtics, then mocks the team and questions their future when they implode and hand a Finals berth to the Heat anyway.
    • Says the entire eastern half of the bracket was set up to fail in the Finals because the NBA leadership views a Lakers championship as "their version of a happy ending" after a difficult year and are willing to go to any lengths to get that outcome. Given that the NBA and its officials have been caught rigging games and series before, this is actually a justifiable aversion of the Razor.
• Here We Go Again!: The Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors made the NBA Finals for the fourth year in a row in 2018. Tree was not happy and laid into the league in his video on the 2018 NBA Finals with a speech that combines this and a "Reason You Suck" speech into one:
  Tree: Warriors vs. Cavs...fucking hell, again? Shit like this gives ammo to the people that believe that the league is rigged! Despite all of the moves this past offseason, the NBA is once again fucked. But wait a second; I thought things were supposed to be different this year! You know, all of those comments about how I was wrong, and teams like Houston and Portland and Philadelphia and Toronto were going to take the reins? Do people seriously want to watch this shit for the fourth year in a row? This league is a fucking joke! The Cleveland Cavaliers are literally one fucking guy! ONE! LeBron singlehandedly carried a bunch of overpaid scrubs to the Finals because the Eastern Conference is as diluted as my piss! Seriously, what is the point of team building? What is the point of seeding? What is the point of a home-court advantage when LeBron will just pull off some bullshit or Steph Curry will enable cheat codes and rain 3's on a team? This league isn't even interesting. It's two teams head and shoulders over everyone else because one happens to have the greatest player of this generation, and the other became a superteam because Kevin Durant is a fucking spineless snake! A third of the league is deliberately tanking in the hopes of winning the draft lottery. That's not a healthy league; that's one where 90% of the teams are fucked from the get-go! I don't want to hear another word from people defending this shit until LeBron goes somewhere else! Maybe then we can get new teams in the final, at least. Go watch some hockey; you'll thank me later.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Does he really hate the Steelers as much as he claims to? Sure, he gives them more vitriol than probably any other franchise he's ever covered, but over time, it's become more apparent that a part of him, even if it's incredibly small, is still a passionate fan of the franchise. He rejoices with the team when they win, and lashes out when they lose... whether it's at or for them depends on whether he feels they lost because they got in their own way. To say the least, his relationship with the Steelers has become a complicated one, and if your impression of his Pharisee rant is that his last word on the team is that he hates them, well, think again.
  • Tree is a surprisingly decent singer, and has busted out his vocal chops in a few of his videos.
  • In his "Congrats, Ravens! (2023)" video, he pulls off a great parody of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", complete with the structure and inflection.
• Hidden Track:
  • "Congrats Lightning (2018)" switches to "Congrats Predators (2018)" 3/4 of the way through before switching back to the Lightning for the final eighth of the video.
  • "The Suntrust Massacre" (aka "Congrats Braves 2019") comes with a side helping of "Congrats Twins" at 2:21. Unlike "Congrats Rockies 2018", ("hidden" in the last 20 seconds of "Congrats Indians 2018",) it contained about a minute of actual footage & narrative.
• History Repeats: Anytime he says someone has "learned nothing" in a video, this trope is in effect.
  • When talking about the Browns-Jets matchup in week three of the 2018 season, he can't help but draw a line between the Jets knocking Drew Bledsoe out of a game in 2001 and them knocking a struggling Tyrod Taylor out of this game, not helped by Baker Mayfield coming in and lighting up the Jets like Brady normally does to them.
  • When talking about coach Guy Boucher in "The Ottawa Senators: Professional Hockey's Incompetent Bureaucrat", he points out that the on-ice meltdown experienced by the Senators following their heartbreaking loss in Game 7 of the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals looks eerily similar to the Tampa Bay Lightning's meltdown following their loss in Game 7 of the same round in 2011, and draws a line to Boucher's continued use of the 1-3-1 Neutral Zone Trap in Ottawa, pointing out that the system requires a lot of exertion and for every skater to be at peak performance or it falls apart.
    Tree: Just like in Tampa Bay, Guy Boucher may have worn out the Sens. He has learned nothing.
  • In his Vancouver video, he pointed out that with the Edmonton Oilers not only back on the rise after ten years in the basement, but scooping the Canucks for free agents left and right, among them Vancouver native Milan Lucic and Canucks GM Jim Benning's own nephew Matt, all signs pointed to the Canucks having to play little brother to the Oilers just like they did in the '80s. Of course, with the Oilers falling back into the basement and running into cap problems the next year, and Benning getting lucky on a string of seemingly questionable trades and signings, this seems to be subverted.
• Hope Spot:
  • A recurring element in his videos is that certain teams finding themselves in situations where they might finally shed their reputations for failure and/or misery, only to come up short in painful fashion. "The Haters Guide to the 2018 NBA Finals" shows this on a league-wide scale when the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets go up 3-2 in their Conference Finals series against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors respectively, particularly in the case of Rockets-Warriors. Unfortunately, the Celtics were already down their star players, while the Rockets lost Chris Paul midway through the Western Conference Finals, and both the Cavs and Warriors recovered to face each other in the Finals for the fourth year in a row.
  • In the 2018 Week 15 Episode of Days of Our Steelers, "A Patriot's End", Tree believes that the Patriots' comeback was inevitable, just like it always is, and was just waiting for Brady & Belichick to beat the Steelers again... except that Tom Brady came up just short on the final drive. Ultimately played straight, however, when the Steelers lost the following week in New Orleans taking them out of the Wild Card race save by an extremely unlikely Tiebreaker and making them dependent on the Browns to beat the Ravens to claim the Division, which the Browns failed to do.
• Hypocrite: "The Pittsburgh Steelers: Professional Football's Pharisee" establishes that his central problem with the team is that the entire organization and a significant percentage of the fanbase, particularly within the city and the greater Allegheny County, are this. In fact, the term "Pharisee" is a synonym for "hypocrite"^note albeit a problematic one, as it's derived from an order of Jewish priests who were the dominant force in the religion around the time of Christ, and were frequently portrayed as antagonists to him in the Bible due, in no small part, to moralistic hypocrisy. As this group evolved into the Rabbinic order that forms one of the major branches of modern Judaism, and with modern Jews arguing that the portrayal of the Pharisees in the Bible is distorted, this usage of the term has been falling out of favor since the 1940s and a slightly modified definition of the term is used in the text summary in place of the normal definition of Lolcow.
• I Have Many Names: His 2016 Channel Trailer acknowledges his habit of constantly changing screen names, listing Schlasser, UrinatingTree and Fat Mann as well as "Fat Fuck" and "That Emofag", before trailing off with "whatever the hell I'm calling myself this month", with the caption box that's been flashing each name showing "I don't know anymore".
  • His twitter screenname regularly changes based on recent events.
• I Meant to Do That: After the Tampa Bay Lightning got swept in the first round of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Tree's mockery was very loud. They would go on to dominate for the next three seasons (thus far winning the next two Stanley Cups). After the first win, he tried to walk it back and claim he shit on them so hard that they had no choice but to become dominant. After the second one, he merely regretted not smacking at them in a different way.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Mentioned in his "The Greatest Game" video for NFL 2023 Week 12 between the Vikings and Bears after Justin Fields lost a fumble.
  Tree: I cut my drinking significantly for weight loss this year. I am seriously regretting that decision right now.
• In Memoriam: Invoked. For the 2018 NFL Season, "This Week In Sportsball" added one of these for players injured during the relevant week's games. As "Taps" plays, it shows footage of a candle burning as headlines about the injured players flash by on screen, each one accompanied by a Sickening "Crunch!". Season-ending injuries also trigger the "[[Unit Lost" clip. Actual deaths in the football world (e.g. Paul Allen and Alex Spanos in the Week Six video, and Bob McNair in Week 12) swap out the other SFX for church bells.
  • A more serious example happens in the 2022 Week 17 episode for former Jaguars offensive lineman Uche Nwaneri, whom Tree had become good friends with.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: The miniseries "In Which All Optimism Dies", where highlights of Tree's livestreams (including "The Dumpster Fire" with Five Points Vids) are shown — specifically, the ones where breaking developments cause Tree or Five Points to lose hope for their teams.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: A Running Gag in his videos. He'll be singing a team's praises for making a smart choice, saying how good a player looks, or saying something along the lines of "there's no way [Team/Player/Coach X] could possibly screw this up." Inevitably, a Record Needle Scratch cuts in, showing footage or headlines of the team tanking, a player being done for the season, or a coach making an unbelievably dumb decision.
• Ironic Echo:
  • The "Congrats, Indians!" video does this to a sportscaster's call that the Indians "WILL have an October to remember!".
  • "0-16: The Story of the 2017 Cleveland Browns" does to to Cleveland head coach Hue Jackson's statement that "we're not going 1-15 again". A caption notes "well, technically, he was right..."
  • Jeff Fisher, ex-head coach for the Rams: "I'm not fuckin' going 7-9." Tree dismally remarks, "He's right. He went 4-9."
  • The end of "Buffalo: The Walking Mediocrity of Professional Sports" does it to Rick Jeanneret's famous "May Day!" call on Brad May's series-clinching goal in the 1993 Sabres-Bruins playoff matchup, distorting it into a dark commentary on the state of Buffalo Sports by putting it over footage of various failures by both the Bills and Sabres, with footage of the Hindenburg disaster superimposed over it.
  • "Congrats, Warriors! (2019)" turns around his usual admonishment of "You're Fucked!" to the majority of the NBA, this time directing it at the Golden State Warriors, due to losing the 2019 Finals to the Toronto Raptors while having severe injuries ^note the most critical being a torn Achilles Tendon for Kevin Durant, which he made worse by attempting a premature return in the Finals; and a torn ACL for Klay Thompson in the decisive sixth game of the series and impending free agency departures likely to gut the core that had run roughshod over the league for most of the previous five years.
  • His "Congrats, Lightning!" 2021 video consists of the audio of his "Congrats, Lightning" 2019 video from when the Tampa Bay Lightning got swept in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs by the Columbus Blue Jackets playing over highlights from Tampa Bay's 2020 and 2021 Stanley Cup runs (along with a screencap of a tweet he made saying the Lightning should nuke the team after they were swept), with a long text regretting that smack talk and wishing he had reacted differently.
    Tree: The great walk of shame begins.
• It Will Never Catch On:
  • Tree's initial reaction to the Vegas Golden Knights, the then-newest expansion franchise in the NHL. First, the idea of putting a franchise in Las Vegas when other Sunbelt experiments were actively failing. Then their choices in the Expansion Draft. Tree surmised that their strategy in the expansion year seemed to be "tank for the future", which he felt was a poor idea in a market with no history of supporting professional sports franchises and numerous other entertainment options, one that would only grow more crowded when the Raiders showed up in the next two to three years. Then they started playing—and winning, no matter how much adversity piled up on their plates, until they had reached the Stanley Cup Finals, a distinction they shared only with the St. Louis Blues among NHL teams.^note and Tree put a huge asterisk on the Blues' "accomplishment", since the 1967-68 expansion teams were put in the same conference, meaning one of those expansion teams would've made it no matter what Tree now recognizes that management seems to have been looking for players that both fit the scheme they had devised as well as having certain personality traits that would help cultivate chemistry, and that their winning ways have made them a media darling and already seem to be cultivating a noticeable fanbase despite the issue of being in the southwest.
  • In "State of the Tree 2017", Tree basically invokes this on his own return to YouTube and subsequent subscriber explosion:
    • Firstly, his original return video, "The Mainstream Media Needs To Die", was originally meant as a one-off rant about media bias during the 2016 U.S. Election cycle. Instead it re-lit his fire to make videos, which resulted in him making a small menagerie of videos on different subjects, including the above-mentioned video game Postmortem series.
    • Next was "The Cleveland Browns: Professional Football's Lolcow", which he also intended to be a one-off dalliance into sports. Then the Jaguars hit rock bottom, and he realized he had enough thoughts and material for a video on them, which became "Professional Football's Forgotten Lolcow". Then other sports stories of interest began happening, and the Lolcows In Sports series supplanted his other material to become the channel's main focus.
    • Then there was "The Haters' Guide to the 2017 NFL Playoffs", which was an experiment that he had expected to draw "300, 400 views, tops" (for reference, he had about 500 subscribers at the time). Within a few days, the video had topped 10,000 views and he then noticed a gain of about 100 subscribers in a day. He dismissed that as "flukey voodoo magic" only for new subs to continue flooding in while the first Haters' Guide video eventually topped 200k views and "The Haters' Guide to Super Bowl LI" went north of 500k by year's end.
    • And then "The Haters' Guide to Super Bowl LII" became his first video to reach one million views, reaching that mark on November 12, 2018, less than ten months after being posted.
    • In summation:
      Tree: If you were to tell me before I made that hastily scripted video rambling about the election that thirteen months later my subscriber numbers would multiply by almost 200 times, I would be doing videos regularly in a completely unexpected medium, I would be averaging 100,000 viewers per video, I would be getting sponsorships for said videos, I'd be dabbling in other mediums like Discord, live-streaming, Dailymotion and Facebook, and I'd be at the point where you'd consider doing this full-time, I honesty would have laughed in your face and threatened to chuck you into an asylum.
• I Warned You:
  • "Congrats, Steelers!" starts with him telling Steeler Nation and everyone else who had doubted his analysis of the team in "The Haters Guide to the 2018 NFL Playoffs", as well as his prior complaints about them throughout the first season of "This Week In Sportsball", that their loss to the Jaguars in the Divisional Round was emblematic of everything he had been complaining about.
  • When talking about Dan Bylsma's hiring by the Buffalo Sabres, he points out that most of the Penguins fanbase tried to warn Terry Pegula that he was stubborn, frustrating and egotistical, that his reliance on "marginally skilled veteran grinders" was a key factor in the Pens' playoff struggles after their Cup win in 2009, and that his regular season record in Pittsburgh was boosted by elite talent that pre-dated his arrival. Sure enough, his arrival in Buffalo led to continued poor play on the ice, infighting in the locker room that eventually spilled onto the ice and, in April 2017, a power play by rising star Jack Eichel that led to the firings of both Bylsma and the GM that hired him, Tim Murray.
  • The New Jersey Devils segment of "The Haters Guide to the 2018-19 NHL Season: Eastern Conference Edition" included him reminding the team and their fans that Pens fans warned them about GM Ray Shero, only to get brushed off just like with Bylsma and Buffalo. In Shero's case, he decided to sit out free agency in the 2018 off-season and "bitch about player salaries" rather than bolster a Devils roster that had earned an unexpected playoff berth in a stacked Metro Division the previous season.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Explicitly invoked in regards to Terry Bradshaw, whom Tree calls an asshole right before saying that his "cheerleader" comments about Mike Tomlin were dead-on.
  • Implied with regards to Larry Johnson, infamous for directing derogatory comments including a homophobic slur at Todd Haley early in his tenure as head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Tree concluded that Haley's own disposition played a role in provoking Johnson's outbursts and that his "faux-tough guy routine" and offensive ineptitude was actually making Ben Roethlisberger look sympathetic by comparison.
  • Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary. Tree concedes that he's got his share of issues, even briefly flashing a headline about his derogatory comments toward the CEO of Uber, but points out that in opposing public funding for either version of the Flames' proposed arena, he's actually acting in the interest of his constituents as well as trying to avoid the mistake that Edmonton made in drowning themselves financially to keep the Oilers in town.
• Jumping the Shark: Explicitly invoked and discussed in "The Detroit Red Wings: Decline and Fall of an Empire." After providing other examples of the pivotal moments in a team's decline—the 49ers firing coach Jim Harbaugh, the Islanders being sold to swindler John Spano, James Dolan's meddlesome majority ownership of the Knicks, Canucks fans rioting in downtown Vancouver after losing Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals—Tree says that the moment the Red Wings truly got terrible was when executive Ken Holland refused to be Kicked Upstairs in favor of Steve Yzerman.
• Kicked Upstairs: He refers to the trope as "firing via promotion", such as when the new Carolina Hurricanes ownership did this to former GM Ron Francis following the 2017-18 season. He notes Florida Panthers GM Dale Tallon as an example who was later brought back downstairs, due to his short-lived replacement Tom Rowe making a mess of what had been a playoff contender while trying to transform them into analytics kings.
• Large Ham: His voiceovers are akin to a wrestling narrator, which adds to the comedy given the contrast between the subject (mostly failure) and the delivery.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Believed to be the reason why the Chicago Bears have been a lolcow going on three decades now.
• Loophole Abuse: In "The Haters Guide to the 2021 Stanley Cup", he makes mention of the large number of fans and even players who were mad at the Tampa Bay Lightning for making use of the NHL's salary cap rules surrounding injured players^note who can be effectively removed from the team's cap figure while placed on the Long-Term Injury Reserve list and the playoffs^note the league stops restricting a roster's daily salary once the regular season ends to assemble a playoff roster that was approximately 17.3 million dollars over the cap.^note more than half the discrepancy was due to Nikita Kucherov ($9.5 million cap hit) missing the entire regular season due to offseason hip surgery but played the entire playoffs; speculation arose in some circles that he was held on LTIR after recovering enough to play so that they could retain other members of the team He also noted the hypocrisy in calling the Lightning out but not teams like the Maple Leafs, whom he refers to as habitual abusers of the cap rules.^note to the point that some people refer to them placing players on LTIR as "shipping them to Robidas Island" He also mentions the irony of Tampa having been on the other end in 2015, when they lost to a Blackhawks squad that was $5 million over the regular-season cap.
• Love It or Hate It: In his trailer video for his channel, he notes that he is well aware that his voice is either really annoying or really pleasant, but he feels the bombastics make his videos funnier.
• Mad Libs Catch Phrase: "What the fuck is a [concept]" for when teams seem to forget basic sports strategy during a game, like "defensive replacements" in the late innings of a baseball game (Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, specifically). The same phrase has also been used to describe rule changes in the NFL that cause controversy among the fanbase, such as "what the fuck is a catch?" for the 2017/18 season's labyrinthine catch rules, as well as "what the fuck is a tackle?" to describe changes to tackles in the 2018/19 season that make a defensive player more likely to get penalized for roughing the passer.
• Medal of Dishonor: Most episodes of "This Week In Sportsball" hand out a Lolcow of the Week (Month in the case of the MLB episodes) award for spectacular displays of on-field ineptitude.
• Misblamed: Invoked in how Tree sees Nathan Peterman's infamous stint as the Bills' QB. While Tree acknowledges Peterman's incompetence, he also points out that the Bills' offensive line was never really there to carry him, and that he was hastily thrown in to the starting position.
• The Nicknamer: Tree has handed out nicknames like candy:
  • The Ginger Hammer: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
  • Captain Fat Fuck, Leader of Men: Former Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger.
  • The Diva/The Cancer: Former WR Antonio Brown.
  • Petermeme: Former Bills and current Bears QB Nathan Peterman.
  • Fitzception: Former journeyman QB Ryan Fitzpatrick.
  • Bologna Sandwich Man: Former Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone.
  • The Cocky Sonofabitch From Oklahoma: Former Browns, current Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield.
  • Famous Jameis and Turnover Machine: Former Buccaneers and current Saints QB Jameis Winston.
  • The Clapmaster: Former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett
  • Mitch Kissentitties, The Titty-Kisser: Former Bears and current Steelers QB Mitch Trubisky.
  • Blaine Fucking Gabbert: Blaine Gabbert, former journeyman quarterback; Tree consistently portrays Gabbert as a Hope Crusher for any team that he plays for.
  • The Diamond Dogs: The Los Angeles Chargers (starting in 2018)
  • The Mega Douche: San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York.
  • Unified Church of Wentz: The Philadelphia Eagles.
  • Big. Dick. Nick: Former Eagles QB Nick Foles.
  • Walking Mediocrity: The Buffalo Bills. (And to some extent, the Sabres (though the Bills have at least ended some of their futility))
  • The Bungles: The Cincinnati Bengals. (They've had this nickname since The '90s)
  • The Andy Reid Show: The Kansas City Chiefs.
  • NFL Retirement Home: The Arizona Cardinals.
  • The Derp: The New York Giants.
    • The Sentient Derp: Former Giants quarterback Eli Manning.
    • Danny Derps: Current Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, known for making fumbles at critical times in games.
  • Snorlax: Retired NHL coach Ken Hitchcock.
  • Barbecue Bruce: Former Wild and Canucks coach Bruce Boudreau.
  • The Unicorn: Former Angels and current Dodgers P/DH Shohei Ohtani, who is notable for being both a pitcher and a power hitter.
  • The Unibrow: Former New Orleans Pelicans and current Lakers F Anthony Davis.
  • The Evil Empire: Depending on the sport, either the New England Patriots or New York Yankees.
  • Kari Let-them-in: NHL goaltender Kari Lehtonen, whose final years with the Dallas Stars were rife with giving up gimme goals and allowing goals off shots that anyone else would stop.
  • Edlose Diaz: New York Mets "closer of the future" Edwin Diaz, who has an over 5 ERA and multiple blown saves, including, most notably, blowing a 6-run lead against the Washington Nationals.
  • Triple-Double Man: Former Oklahoma City Thunder and current Washington Wizards PG Russell Westbrook, who is known for chasing triple-doubles and stat-padding than winning games.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • When discussing eatdatpussy445 in the Philadelphia Eagles video.
  • At the end of "Congrats, Dodgers! (2018)", while discussing the Dodgers' possible violations of ''U.S. law'' with their recruitment practices in Latin America with the added ramifications of the RICO Act^note a federal law in the U.S. that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. looming over them, a caption reading "I wish I was being hyperbolic" pops up.
    Tree: "And I'm not just saying that to be an edgelord, you might be legitimately fucked! Pray to whatever gods you have that this shit blows over because this could be getting ugly."
• Once an Episode:
  • Every episode of "This Week in Sportsball" for the 2017-18 NFL season has included "FUCK YOU, SPANOS!" when talking about the Chargers, aimed at owner Dean Spanos and his Epic Failure in running the Chargers franchise. Exaggerated, when he delivers a "FUCK YOU, SPANOS!" while the Chargers were in their bye week, and even further when he delivers it in a video about another Los Angeles team. Careful eyes will also see the magic words written in the thumbnail for each episode to tease its appearance. The gag was altered beginning with the Week 14 Edition, in response to the Chargers becoming genuine playoff contenders in their division by that point. Tree would instead throw in variants such as "¡PUTA MADRE, SPANOS!". Brought back in triumphant fashion in the season finale, when the Chargers won their final game of the season but missed the playoffs on tiebreakers. It was also altered in Week 12 where they win against the Cowboys, and instead he says "Fuck you, Jerry!" and Week 14, their victory against the Redskins, has him saying "Fuck you, Snyder!" to express his disdain towards those two as well.
  • Nearly every "Lolcows In Sports" video features the definition of Lolcow as used by Tree in the text summary below the video. Among the exceptions are "The Pittsburgh Steelers: Professional Football's Pharisee" (see above for details) and "The Montreal Canadiens: Professional Hockey's Bergevin", which uses Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin's surname as a synonym for managerial incompetence derived from a form of Creator Provincialism.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Tree tones down the ham when he delivers his usual sponsored promotion of SeatGeek in his autopsy of the AAF after it ceased operations in the middle of its first season, as he notes that the executive incompetency had left a lot of its employees in the lurch in terms of travel and health care costs that the players had to shoulder entirely on themselves now.
  • "Congrats, Texans! (2020)" has him showing no mercy towards their coach Bill O'Brien after the aforementioned 24-0 lead becomes a 51-31 loss. Instead of his usual "Conglaturation!", his end of video stinger has the Texans logo over the words "Wow! You suck!" That kind of thing is when you can tell he's really, really angry with what he's seen.
  • "Re: Coronavirus" and "This Week in Sportsball: Cancelled Edition" both deal with the effects of the 2019-20 coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak on the sports world, with players from Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz to eleven players in the Italian Serie A contracting the virus, resulting in basically every sporting competition being put on hold. There is little humor in either video (especially "Re: Coronavirus"), with Tree treating the news seriously with depressing music in the background.
  • His video about the collapse of the 2019 Pittsburgh Pirates, "10,000 Simulations: A Pittsburgh Pirates Story", is spent doing his usual Large Ham style voice, but when he gets to the part talking about former closing pitcher Felipe Vazquez, namely that he was arrested for attempting to solicit sex with a minor, he stops and has to step away from the microphone to yell at the top of his lungs in anger.
  • The Due to the Dead segment for "This Week in Sportsball: NFL Week Two (2020 Edition)." Due to the sheer amount of injuries that week, (a grand total of 45) Taps is replaced with an ominous Drone of Dread. And to top it off, it ends on the deaths of Gale Sayers and New England Patriots running back James White's father.
  • In "Days of our Steelers - Dismay and Old Bay", he instantly drops the snark after then-Steelers' QB Mason Rudolph suffered a hard hit that left him with a concussion.
    Tree: "I'm not even trying to joke; shit like this is sobering."
  • Highlighted in "Re: Damar Hamlin with regards to the halting, and ultimate voiding, of the game where Damar Hamlin collapsed.
    Tree: This situation did something that's unprecedented: It made the NFL stop. Do you know how hard that is to do? This is a league that's played through natural disasters and other insane phenomena. The trauma on that field brought it to a pause.
• Opening Shout-Out: "Buffalo: The Walking Mediocrity of Professional Sports" opens with a title card sequence done in the style of The Walking Dead.
• Orwellian Retcon: The subjects of several Legacy Of Failure videos have broken their losing streaks and won championships after their videos were made. When this happens, Tree goes back and adds a date indicating how long the streak actually lasted, such as adding "1967-2019" to the St. Louis Blues' video after they won their first Stanley Cup in 2019.
• Piss-Take Rap: His Congratulations, Padres (2021) video has him making a deliberately terrible diss track, including blatant Auto-Tune, poor rythym, and non-ryming lyrics.
• Product Placement: In late 2017, "This Week In Sportsball" began carrying spots for online ticket reseller SeatGeek, usually placed in segments for particularly appalling games. He then began inserting them into the beginning of "Haters Guide" and "Lolcows in Sports" videos as well, and the "Revisiting..." series launched with a SeatGeek spot as well. He's since picked up multiple other companies, mostly as one-offs, although Dollar Shave Club has appeared at least twice. He's even been sponsored by a fellow YouTuber, ThatsGoodSports, in "This Week In Sportsball: NFL Week Two Edition (2018)".^note TGS also appeared as a Special Guest on This Week In Sportsball: NFL Week One Edition (2018)" Parodied in "This Week In Sportsball: NFL Week Three Edition (2018)", where the video proclaimed itself to be sponsored by "Refball", a jab at the NFL's infamously poor officiating, especially in regards to the rewritten "Roughing the Passer" rules. (May have been a pragmatic choice as well; that week's "Days Of Our Steelers" carried a SeatGeek spot.)
• Raging Stiffie: Used as a metaphor for his growing excitement over the 2017-18 Tampa Bay Lightning, particularly in "This Week In Sportsball: NHL Trade Deadline Edition" when they come away with the grand prizes of the New York Rangers' fire sale, J.T. Miller and Ryan McDonagh. Subverted in "The Haters Guide to the 2017/18 NHL Playoffs", where he notes his Tampa Bay Boner had "gone flaccid" after the team began to struggle in the final weeks of the regular season. Openly mocked in "Congrats, Lightning!", in which he points out that they gave everyone those metaphorical boners by bringing two more failures into a team full of them, both homegrown Lightning players who had already choked deep into two prior playoff runs, and a litany of other ex-Rangers who spent most of the 2010's choking away shot after shot at the Stanley Cup.
• Required Spinoff Crossover:
  • "Days of our Steelers - Episode Ten: A Shitshow in Sacksonville Abbey" is one with the "Sacksonville Abbey" one-off from earlier in the season, due to the game being a rematch with the Jaguars from their two matchups the previous season. Tree switches between his Days of our Steelers voice and "Richard Shittenborough", the narrator from Sacksonville Abbey, to cover nearly every play from both sides of the crossover.
  • Averted for "D.I.V.A.", as Antonio Brown was not allowed to play for the New England Patriots when they hosted the Steelers in Week 1 of 2019, and "Dallas", which did not have an episode for Week 9 of 2020 when the Cowboys hosted the Steelers.
• Retool: The old video game reviews are gone (but can still be found on YouTube), and he's focusing his efforts on American sports teams.
• Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue...: From "Bruce Boudreau: A Legacy of Failure":
  Tree: Roses are red, violets are blue/Boudreau chokes on that Game 7 barbecue.
• Rule of Three: "This Week In Sportsball: NFL Week Three Edition (2018)" featured three references to the Browns winning for the first time since Christmas 2016 in the thumbnail:
  (On the far left, vertically) Cleveland Won A Game!
  (Still on the left, but horizontally) The Browns Won!
  (On the far right, vertically) Holy Shit The Browns Won!
• Running Gag: Tree has several, enough to merit its own page.
• Sadist Show: Sometimes, the fun is watching Tree's meltdowns and frustrated shouting at whatever he's seeing or describing. During his 2021 livestream of the game that saw his hometown Steelers eliminated from the NFL playoffs by the Cleveland Browns (in humiliating fashion, to boot), Tree even noted that some of his fans were watching for his over-the-top reactions.
• The Scapegoat: Tree has a dim view on coaches and/or management who do this to their star players, such as the Sharks putting the blame for the infamous "reverse sweep" on veteran stalwarts Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton. (Tree himself blames since-fired coach Todd McLellan for the incident and their other playoff failures, and holds up McLellan's performance in Edmonton^note for example, their league-worst penalty kill percentage on home ice vs. their league-leading PK percentage in away games in the 2017-18 season as further evidence of this.)
• Second Place Is for Winners: "Tank Bowls", football games between two struggling teams. The winner gets a game that won't mean much when they more than likely fail to reach the playoffs, the loser gets a higher first round pick in the draft.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • In general, Tree operates on the assumption that his predictions for championships are going to turn out wrong. In his prediction for the 2017 Stanley Cup Finals, Tree thought the Nashville Predators were going to win... so he immediately congratulated the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Predators' opponents. It's become something of a Running Gag among his fanbase that, whenever he picks a team to win or do well in a season, their opponents are going to win instead.
  • When he picked the Washington Capitals to win the 2018 Stanley Cup, he gave among the reasons why they were really going to win that the cosmos were angry at him for exploiting their past failures to bolster his audience, along with making him suffer as a Penguins fan.^note In terms of real-world factors, he picked the Caps because their style of play had been killing speed-based teams throughout the 2018 postseason, and their Finals opponent, the Vegas Golden Knights, was heavily reliant on a speed-based approach.
  • "Congrats, UrinatingTree!" was full of this, taking about "doing something with [his] miserable and pathetic life" when he reached 100,000 subscribers.
  • When discussing the Pirates fanbase, he describes the analytics nerds sect with a "heavy emphasis on the anal", then lumps himself in as a member before describing the superiority complex they maintain over the Yinzer and Conspiracy Theorist sects "because we can actually read".
  • At the start of "Anatomy of Misery: Pitt Men's Basketball", he identifies as a fan due to having several relatives who went to the school, then drops this line:
    Tree: It's in times like these when I wish I wasn't a total idiot when I was seven.
  • When recapping the Penguins' second round playoff loss to the Capitals in "The Haters Guide to the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals", he threatens to "rage harder than an entitled twat in a Starbucks line" if Kris Letang is still on the team the next year. Meanwhile, the following caption pops up:
    Overreact much, Tree? Yeesh.
  • In "A Yinzer in Jerryworld," Tree records himself doing a few football drills at a practice facility, outright saying that it's "going to be a fail montage." When attempting the vertical leap (the try preceded with a voiceover stating "It was at this moment that he knew, he fucked up."), he doesn't even hit the lowest possible marker, which prompts a Grand Theft Auto V "WASTED" graphic to flash on the screen.
  • During "This Week in Sportsball" for Week 9, 2019, Tree said of the Raiders and Lions that "both of these teams need a win like my fat ass needs a treadmill and a set of weights."
  • In "A Yinzer At Spring Training: Tales of Clumsiness and Clickbait," Tree hits golf balls at a driving range and hits baseballs off of a tee at the MLB spring training camp. He misses the ball several times when golfing, and only hits three out of seven baseballs off the tee. Each time, several of his "failure" sound effects play, including the "bruh" sound effect and The Price is Right losing horn.
  • In a 2020 episode of "This Week in Sportsball", Tree gave himself the "Lolcow of the Week" award because he thought he caught COVID-19 due to ignoring safety protocols.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: Many of the teams Tree critiques became laughingstocks due to incompetent management decisions, poor trades, and other easily avoidable behind-the-scenes screw-ups, though some teams have had bad luck as well.
• Sequel: "The Atlanta Falcons: A Legacy of Failure" is something of a sequel to one of his first sports videos, "Congrats, Falcons!" It even starts with the same clip (James White scoring the winning touchdown of Super Bowl LI). And THAT gets a new addition to it in "Congrats, Falcons!" 2018 Edition when they lose to the Eagles in the Divisional Round of the playoffs thanks to four failed attempts to pass into the end zone at the end for what would have been a game winning touchdown.
• Serial Escalation: In "Congrats, Texas Football!" Tree tries to cheer Texas up after Hurricane Harvey by showing college football from different Texas big-name colleges—University of Texas, Baylor University, and Texas A&M. The choke-jobs get progressively worse.
• Shout-Out: Tree now has his own page.
• Side Effects Include...: At the end of his video on the New York Mets:
  Side effects of Mets games may include increased alcohol consumption, cynicism, dread, stomach ulcers, passive-aggressiveness, and racial obscenities. If you experience simmering rage for longer than four hours after Mets games, please seek medical attention immediately. Do not watch the Mets if you have high blood pressure or are taking any kind of heart medication. Refrain from seeing the Mets if you are pregnant or nursing. Mentioning the words "Yankees", "Omar Minaya", or "Bernie Madoff" may cause other fans to experience paralysis and/or loss of facial functioning. Usage of these words at Citi Field are grounds for exile to Harlem for hard labor.
• Sincerity Mode:
  • Unlike other "Congrats!" videos which are done full of sarcasm, his "Congrats, Astros!", "Congrats, Capitals!", and "Congrats, Blues!" are done straight, celebrating the victories of the Houston Astros in the 2017 World Series, the Washington Capitals in the 2018 Stanley Cup Final, and the St. Louis Blues in the 2019 Stanley Cup Final, the first championships in each of their respective 40+ year histories.
  • In general, he treats severe injuries far more delicately than the rest of the things he talks about. For this moment and for others in the series, "Taps" can be heard in the background. During "This Week in Sportsball: NFL Week Fourteen Edition" in 2017, he dropped all pretenses of humor and snark when talking about Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier's possible career-ending injury to his spine and neck:
    Tree: The Steelers claim this victory in honor of Ryan Shazier, whom unfortunately seems to have suffered all but the worst-case scenario. At this rate, I don't even care if he comes back to the NFL; I just want him to be able to live a full and healthy life without limitations. And you should, too. This sort of thing always transcends the world of sport, regardless of team and affiliation, and it sucks to see such a great player be struck down in his prime. Take care, Ryan.
  • He doesn't even bother trying to conceal his rage at Stan Kroenke. Not only did Kroenke screw the city of St. Louis over, he also screwed people in Texas over when he bullied them into giving up their land so he could annex it onto his own property. Being able to steamroll homeowners in the area, Kroenke wielded so much power over them that one of them felt there was nothing left to do but kill himself. Thus, Tree's rage isn't solely for Kroenke's gross incompetence as a figure in major league sports, and there's no question he was absolutely furious about this. And rightfully so. It's been noted as one of the few times his voice sounded genuinely angry in his sports coverage.
  • From his "This Week in Sportsball: NCAA March Madness Edition", his extent of "Congratulations!" to UMBC (who defeated #1 seed Virginia as a #16 seed) is also sincere.
  • "The Greatest Game" got its first sincere video with Bills-Chiefs match from 2021-22 NFL playoffs, a nail-biting epic that saw 25 points, three lead changes, and a game-tying field goal just in the final two minutes of regulation.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The more comical and light-hearted tracks from the Ren And Stimpy Production Music album accompany almost every single verbal dissection of the team du jour.
• Spinoff:
  • "A Legacy Of Failure", from "Lolcows In Sports". The Capitals video is filed in both playlists on his YouTube page as a reflection of this.
  • "Days Of Our Steelers", from "This Week In Sportsball". Tree initially meant "Episode Three - Walking The Plank" as a one-time split due to the segment spanning around four minutes (not counting the plug for SeatGeek), or about a third of the length of the corresponding episode of Sportsball. Then he had to split off week four, as well. By week six, he was predicting that he wouldn't be able to merge the two back together since the Steelers' locker room kept spiraling and generating multiple new headlines every week.
  • Similarly, "Sacksonville Abbey" and "Dallas" as alternate versions of "Days of Our Steelers" for the Jaguars and Cowboys respectively. The (then) Oakland Raiders were going to get one as "Raiders of the Lost Season", but Antonio Brown taking a lot of the drama with him when he was cut had that series retooled as "D.I.V.A."
• Spiritual Successor: At the start of "The San Jose Sharks: A Legacy of Failure", Tree acknowledges that the Sharks themselves are too young to truly have one under his own rules^note No other Legacy of Failure video handles a franchise younger than forty years, then ties them to the Oakland Seals, a member of the expansion class of 1967 that played in the San Francisco Bay Area until being moved to Cleveland in the 1976 off-season and being rechristened as the Barons. They in turn were contracted in 1978 and their remains merged into the Minnesota North Stars.^note Now called the Dallas Stars. The main tie between the Seals and Sharks were the Gund Brothers, who had ownership stakes in the Seals/Barons team, joined the North Stars in 1978, then gained an expansion team in the early '90s as consolation after a blocked attempt at moving the North Stars to the Bay Area. The Sharks also wound up in the Cow Palace, the former home of the Seals, for their first few years. Adding the Seals/Barons history to the Sharks tacks on two first-round playoff exits and several seasons of bottom-dwelling.
• Springtime for Hitler: Discussed with the "Tank Bowl" segments of This Week in Sportsball. In Tree's mind, teams that are doing really badly on the season should just keep losing to improve their draft placement. Thus, any team that wins a Tank Bowl game is said to be "fucking up their tank" by winning a meaningless game and making their draft position worse.
• Status Quo Is God: In "Congrats, Caps! (2019)", Tree considers the Capitals' Stanley Cup victory the previous season a fluke, then takes the time to mock them for, once again, losing in the first round.
• Stealth Pun: During the Haters Guide to the 2021 NFL Draft, the Packers draft picks and Aaron Rodgers threatening to quit because of it causes Tree to state the team is in serious jeopardy. The background for this section is Aaron Rodgers hosting Jeopardy!.
• Stock Sound Effects: A Record Needle Scratch for the occasional Ass Pull invoked; a Sickening "Crunch!" over (typically) slow-motion footage of injuries; a duck quacking for immediate contradictions of what someone on-screen just said; Dell Conagher (aka the Engineer) saying "Nope!" for other miscellaneous failures.
  • As for the Injury List at the end of an episode of "This Week In Sportsball"...
    • Sickening "Crunch!": A player sustained an injury.
    • Incurable Cough of Death: A player tested positive for COVID-19.
    • Police Horn and Siren: A player was suspended.
    • "Unit Lost!": A player is either out for the season or out of a job. Usually accompanied by the Sickening "Crunch!", but sometimes paired with the cough.
    • Gong: A sports figure (or a relative thereof) died.
• Stock Scream: Injuries to players crucial to a team's success will cause one of several of these to pop up alongside the Sickening "Crunch!". He also uses a "Unit Lost" sound for season-ending injuries; siren chirps for suspended or arrested players and personnel; and gongs for retirements, firings, and deaths.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Seeing and reporting on really bad collapses (especially blown leads) makes him sound like he's in intense pain.
• Suicide as Comedy: In the Legacy of Failure video for the San Jose Sharks, Tree runs out of alcohol and chooses to drink bleach instead, mixing it with ammonia after they get embarrassed by the Blues in 2012 (St. Louis' first playoff series win in a decade). At the very end, when the Sharks lose to the Vegas Golden Knights in the 2018 playoffs, he declares that he's "going to go off and die now", then wondering if the Sharks will "let [him] down at [his] funeral like they have the past 15 years."
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Tree's video on the 1993-94 Houston Oilers paints the team in this light. While the on-field product slowly improved, including an 11-game winning streak to end the season at 12-4, the off-field drama was far more interesting and lead to the team's total collapse. A power struggle between coaches and owners began the year, and the "Babygate" scandal blew up in management's faces when they chastised and fined a player, offensive tackle David Williams, for missing a game because his wife was giving birth to their first child. The latter was seen by the public as a case of Skewed Priorities, leading to the Oilers quickly backpedaling and rescinding the punishments. All of it seemed to be quelled when defensive lineman Jeff Alm killed himself after accidentally getting a friend killed from a night of drunk driving, which gave the Oilers something to rally around. But tensions returned during the team's final regular-season game against the Jets. The offensive and defensive coordinators, Kevin Gilbride and Buddy Ryan respectively, got into a fist fight, with another fight getting broken up in the press box. The drama was all anyone was talking about with the Oilers, and after they lost to the Chiefs in their first post-season game, pretty much everyone got fired and the team was stripped bare.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Very common in his videos; he'll propose a hypothetical that immediately gets shut down... occasionally in mid-sentence.
  • Not limited to scripted videos, either: his livestream held during the trade deadline of the 2018-19 NHL season had him express pleasant gratitude about the Penguins not making previous years' mistakes of trading a first-round pick for a slow, physical player...right as news breaks that the Penguins did just that.^note Though it was a former first-round pick, Tanner Pearson, that the Penguins traded for Erik Gudbranson, rather than an actual first-round pick for a future draft.
  • Subverted in the Days of Our Steelers episode "Vanquished Leader of Men". At the end of the episode, Tree pleads for the Steelers to "win against San Fran so I don't have to separate this again." Despite the Steelers' loss, Days of Our Steelers was nowhere to be seen the following week.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives them out to teams that have committed really egregious failures and mismanagement of various teams.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Another common reaction when talking about lolcow teams. It gets Double Subverted at the start of "The Pittsburgh Pirates: Professional Baseball's Drunken Sailor", because he self-admits to being a fan of the team as he is a native of Pittsburgh.
  • More acute at the end of "This Week in Sportsball: NFL Week Seventeen Edition (2022)" when Tree got to the injury roundup, and was going to have to get around not only to Damar Hamlin's near-fatal injury that week, but to the death of former NFL player and personal friend Uche Nwaneri.
    Tree: This is the part I've been dreading the most. The injury roundup. God, this is gonna sting.
• To the Pain: Again, describing the Falcons' legendary collapse during Super Bowl LI
  Tree: Oh, you thought I was just going to glance over this?! Bitch, you don't know this channel! This is a special moment in sports. Time to amplify the pain!
• Token Good Teammate: By the final episode of the 2018 season of "Days of Our Steelers", Tree considered Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster as this for displaying maturity in publicly taking responsibility for the fumble that ended any hope of a Steelers comeback in Week 16 against the New Orleans Saints, something that Tree found sorely lacking from other Steelers personnel throughout the season. During his lengthy "The Reason You Suck" Speech at the end of the 2018 season after the Steelers were eliminated from playoff contention, Smith-Schuster is the only person Tree mentions that doesn't get excoriated — rather, Tree expresses dismay at the prospect of JuJu (who only reached age 22 during the season) turning into a self-centered diva because of the culture of the team.
  • As of "Congrats Steelers (2021)," he no longer considers Smith-Schuster this, calling out his pregame habit of inappropriately dancing on the midfield logos of the opposing teams and posting them on TikTok as well as his mocking dismissal of the Cleveland Browns right before the Steelers were humiliated by them in the Wild Card round of the playoffs.
  Tree: No, you're not AB, JuJu. He could create additional space without help, unlike you!
• Tough Love: Tree is not above criticizing his hometown Steelers, Pirates, Penguins, and Pitt Panthers.
• [Trope Name]: "A Message From The Company" spoofs corporate "social awareness" advertisements, partially playing it straight ("marginalized group", "buzzword", "Half-hearted call to emotion") and partially using his usual brand of snark.
• Uncancelled: Temporarily averted for "Days of Our Steelers" when the Steelers lost their first game to the Washington Football Team,^note who went on to win the NFC East, aka Tank Division, but ultimately played straight two weeks later after losses to the Bills... and the Joe-Burrow-less Bengals!^note Sadly, though there were juicy videos in the wake of the Steelers' loss to the Cleveland Browns in the Wild Card round, neither of them were a "Days of Our Steelers" episode.
• Unknown Rival: How Tree sees the relationship between the Steelers and the Patriots. Steelers fans often see their team as one of New England's biggest threats in their conference, despite the fact that the Patriots have consistently manhandled Pittsburgh for a long time, and Tree points out that even though the Steelers have gone to the Super Bowl three times in the Brady/Belichick era, they never had to face the Patriots in those playoff runs.
• Unpleasable Fanbase: Invoked. Tree is a native of the city of Pittsburgh, PA, and has a special breed of contempt for "yinzers"^note Nickname for the natives of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania who have been spoiled by the relative consistency of the Steelers.
  Tree: Anything less than a championship is considered to be a disaster of a season and everyone needs to be fired.
• Verbal Tic: "Ladies and gentlemen", to the point that there was counter for how many times he said it in the "A Yinzer in Jerryworld" vlog.
• Visual Pun: Has a fondness for this.
  • Showing Stock Footage of a burning dumpster is a Running Gag when talking about players/coaches/management/ownership who meet his definition of a dumpster fire, particularly if he actually says the phrase in the video.
  • "Congrats, Ducks! (2018)" intercuts footage of the Ducks getting swept by the Sharks in the opening round of the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs with footage of duck recipe videos and shot out of the air by duck hunters, as well as a few shots from Duck Hunt. It also throws in a musical pun by using Bruce the Shark's Leitmotif from Jaws as background music.
  • "Danica Patrick: Professional Racing's Blue Screen Of Death" features a string of video crashes with non-standard error messages, usually in the middle of Danica crashing on track. It eventually culminated with a blue screen of death.
  • The army tanks that roll across the screen whenever he brings up tanking teams. The "Tank Bowl" intros from "This Week In Sportsball" take it up to eleven by putting the tank graphics over actual footage of tanks parading through the streets.
  • Bad collapses by teams are sometimes accompanied by footage of building collapses.
  • In "The Charlotte Hornets: Professional Basketball's Crying Jordan", Tree introduces Michael Jordan by saying "behold, the G.O.A.T!" followed by footage of an actual goat eating lettuce.
• Vocal Evolution: His bombastic narration style sounded noticeably more stilted and forced in his earlier videos. Over time, he's dialed back the hamminess enough to fit a more natural-sounding cadence.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Another frequent Running Gag is his incredulity that a team or player could screw up a situation that was all cut a sure thing, like a team blowing a huge lead.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The episode of "Days of Our Steelers" corresponding to Week 17 of the 2018 Season, aptly named "Judgement Day", ends with Tree summing up the soap-opera-level drama and antics of the 2018 Pittsburgh Steelers, presuming to end the season with a "see you next year" as he fully expects it to continue at the start of next season in August or September 2019. Immediately a couple of headlines pop-up showing that while this season of the Steelers is done, this season of "Days of Our Steelers" isn't. And as it turns out, he didn't have to wait nine months for another episode — another "Days of Our Steelers" episode was released one month later because of the Antonio Brown situation.
  Headline: [foghorn] Antonio Brown requests trade from Steelers as relationship with team is strained, per report
  UT: What the hell do you mean "we're not done"!?
  Headline: [foghorn] Antonio Brown, James Harrison tease exclusive interview mid-Mike Tomlin press conference
  UT: WHAT THE FUCK-
  [Test Pattern]

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"Well then."
(Cut to test pattern)
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