Burnt Orange Nation: Breaking The Internet With Johnny Manziel

How do you break the Internet? 1) Know people at a University of Texas frat party, make sure Johnny Manziel also attends the party. 2) Make sure your friends have their phones easily accessible, ready to record a video. 3) Tell them to be on the lookout for someone throwing a beer at the head of Manziel followed by students asking him not-so-politely to leave. 4) Get the video of the incident, then post the video along with corroborating story to your web site.

That's the magic formula Burnt Orange Nation, SB Nation's Longhorns blog, followed and boy did it ever work. Their article and video exploded around the Internet over the weekend. Want proof? How about over 2.6 million views of the video so far. More proof? Some of the major players in online sports news (besides SB Nation, of course) referenced Burnt Orange Nation's story. ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, Yahoo, NBC Sports, and the Dallas Morning News.

So how did this magical video appear? I talked to Burnt Orange Nation contributor curry.shoff, the man behind the story, about what happened. He wasn't actually in Austin for the party, he was all the way across the country in North Carolina. But he started receiving texts from friends at the party who knew he wrote at Burnt Orange Nation, they were telling him Johnny Manziel was at the frat party. Being the good journalist that he is, curry.shoff called his friend Marshall Perry who was at the party to find out what was going on; he was sniffing a story. Fortunately, Perry had taken video of Manziel being thrown out of the party and passed it along. curry.shoff was also able to get his hands on some snapshots from the evening.

Even at this point, he wasn't sure exactly what he had, so he did the right thing, he turned to his fellow writers/editors at Burnt Orange Nation for an opinion. The consensus was this was a good story and they should go with it immediately.

And when they did, viral madness!

Head on over to Burnt Orange Nation to check out the video and the other craziness that is the intersection of Johnny Manziel and the University of Texas. Congrats to curry.shoff and Burnt Orange Nation, you broke the Internet!