How TikTok creator and CFB tour guide GFed has become one of the app's biggest successes

At 6:39 a.m., a 6-foot-tall man hops out of his navy blue Mazda CX-5, marked with the dust, grime and dead bugs that give away its heavy travel.

In DeKalb, Ill., it’s a brisk 35 degrees outside. The sun hasn’t yet risen over Huskie Stadium, home of the Northern Illinois Huskies football team, so the stadium lights are on as the team starts an early practice. The man doesn’t seem to be bothered by the cold, though he only wears a navy blue hoodie and a backwards baseball cap.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket, opens TikTok and flips the camera to his mustachioed face.

“Hi. I’m GFed, and I walk on to every D-I football field that I drive by,” he says. “We’re gonna have a day today. I’m at Huskie Stadium…and this is the first of every directional school in Illinois I’m going to in one day.”

Grinding out the "Walk-On Challenge"

For the last three months, rising TikTok star GFed has been committed to his “Walk On Challenge,” a series where he tries to make his way onto the field of every D-I football school in the country – just as long as he doesn’t have to hop any fences or pick any locks.

“I only walk through open doors and just, like, open access where it’s easy to get through,” he tells USA TODAY.

GFed concedes that if they tell him to leave, it’s within their rights and he’s happy to comply. Otherwise, he’s going to continue taking chances.

From sales to lucrative social media stardom

It was a business trip to the least populated state in the nation that changed his life, though of course he didn’t know it at the time.

GFed was traveling from Cheyenne, Wyo. to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in July while on a business trip for his full-time job assisting in sales for various alcohol brands. On the journey, he drove past the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie. He had never been to the campus before, so he decided to do something he always did when he drove past a new college campus: try to check out the athletic facilities. Only this time, GFed was going to record the whole experience for TikTok.

“I’m driving through a random D-I college town today, and if you’re a die-hard sports fan, you already know the rule: gotta see if you can get on the football field,” he said to open the video.

GFed walked down onto the field then finished his recording when he couldn’t get into the basketball arena. Without thinking much of it, he edited then posted the video to TikTok.

He didn’t know it at the time, but he had just posted the first video in what became the “Walk On Challenge.”

After the success of his first video, GFed decided to hit the two campuses closest to his house: Northwestern University and University of Illinois. Both videos, once again, were hits.

“I was three-for-three at that point, and that was kind of when it became like, ‘OK, this is the thing that I’m going to focus my page on now because clearly there’s an audience for it,’” he said.

After that, he was thinking primarily in content mode. A business trip to Oklahoma was just a chance to record videos at Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. A trip he had planned to Washington with his girlfriend was an opportunity to get to Husky Stadium in Seattle.

As he continued to create more videos in his most popular series, GFed’s page grew exponentially. Sixteen days after he hit 10,000 followers, his page crossed the 100,000 mark. His surging popularity has never been a hindrance.

According to the burgeoning social media star, he has never once received an email from a university he’s visited discouraging him from doing what he’s doing. Most of the time, he doesn’t hear anything, but on occasion, he receives correspondence with positive feedback. A few schools have even gone so far as to reach out and start a partnership with the content creator.

Most recently, the University of Louisville gave him tickets to their football team’s game against Notre Dame.

A University of Louisville representative declined a request for comment.

Recently, GFed has gotten connected with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Dolphins. After uploading a video at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami following the Dolphins’ Week 8 game against the Patriots, the content creator even got a shoutout from Miami defender Jalen Ramsey.

The cornerback, who had just played in his first game of the 2023 season after injuring his knee during training camp, invited GFed to join Ramsey and his “people” after the team’s next home game.

As GFed’s page kept growing, he started getting valuable interest from brands and other media organizations looking to make potential partnership deals. So, he decided to take the next big step. He quit his job in late September and is now pursuing content creation full-time.

It was that move that allowed GFed to take on one of his most ambitious projects to date: driving to every directional school in Illinois (Northern Illinois, Western Illinois, Eastern Illinois and Southern Illinois) and walking onto their fields in one day in early October.

As he passes the training facility next door to the football field at Huskie Stadium at NIU, he explains the method to his madness: He often walks past other places on campus he’d like to explore until he finds his way onto the turf. That way, he can avoid any trouble before completing his challenge.

GFed completes his loop around the stadium and finds two open gates: one onto the football field and one onto the baseball field. With the football team still trickling out onto the field for practice, the TikToker balks at fully completing his challenge by walking onto the field.

“[I] don’t want to do too much recording while practice is going on; I’m not Bill Belichick,” he quips in the TikTok video.

After about two hours taking in the campus, he makes his way back to the car and hits the road for his second destination: Macomb, Ill., home of Western Illinois University.

Back in the car leaving NIU, GFed pulls out a bag of Simms Original Smoked Sausages and cracks open his second energy drink of the morning.

“This is my one vice,” he says. “I am freakin’ addicted to energy drinks.”

Despite attending Western Michigan during the height of the P.J. Fleck era, the TikToker is a huge Michigan State basketball fan, having grown up in Lansing. GFed actually started his TikTok page to cover his one true love: college basketball.

“None of my other teams have any sort of consistency like Michigan State basketball,” he says. “I love [Michigan State head basketball coach] Tom Izzo more than anybody. Like, if there’s one person I don’t know personally I’d take a bullet for, it’s him.”

GFed says he started his TikTok page in early March around the time of the NCAA Tournament as a passion project. His decision to try that platform as opposed to other video-sharing sites was a conscious one.

To him, YouTube was too “daunting” to try to get into, with many creators spending months at a time making videos with “literally zero views." So, GFed decided to spend all of his energy into creating content on TikTok.

“I was mostly doing ‘Green Screen’ content like a lot of people around TikTok do… largely around college basketball specifically” he says, referring to the app’s effect that allows users to take videos of their faces in front of a still image in the background. “I had some degree of success with that. Nowhere near what I’m doing right now.”

Having that background in content creation, even though it was about a different topic, helped him when his page started to blow up with the Walk-On Challenge videos.

The stop at Western Illinois is uneventful, with an open gate onto Hanson Field facing the parking lot. The most excitement there comes from an unlikely source: a statue of a hurdler beyond the far end zone and next to the track that loops the field.

The statue is Lee Calhoun, two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 110m hurdles and later the track coach for the Leathernecks, hence the statue. The reason for the excitement is GFed’s background as a hurdler back in his high school days.

“I went to a small high school, and I was the only hurdler we had, so I did that all through high school,” GFed says.

Storytelling and thriving in the danger zone

Despite participating in a variety of sports when he was younger, none of them have captured GFed’s attention as much as another sport. On the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Macomb, Ill. to Charleston, Ill., he shares just how much he loves professional wrestling.

The rising TikTok star is obsessed with it. It’s not something many people know unless they’ve talked to him or picked up on (very) subtle clues in the content he’s created. But GFed claims to know everything there is to know about the world of professional wrestling from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. The storylines, the characters and the performances captivated him from a young age. “Nothing like it has ever been done before or since,” he says.

As a content creator on one of the biggest social media apps in the world, GFed is something of a performer and storyteller himself.

For professional wrestlers, it’s about the crazy stunts and the blending of kayfabe storylines with reality. For GFed, it’s about the behind-the-scenes looks he provides at college football stadiums that millions of viewers see on TV every week but often would never get the chance to visit.

One of the biggest differences between the TikToker and those professional wrestlers is that GFed prefers to take a backseat to the spectacle of what he’s seeing. The videos, he says, aren’t about him. They’re about him facilitating an experience for the viewer.

The questions he aims to answer at the top of each video are, “who the hell is this guy, where the hell is this guy and who the hell is he with.”

In truth, GFed is obsessed with the art of content creation, something that’s only grown since he’s started to do it full-time. He’s constantly thinking of ways to maximize his potential audience and keep viewers engaged throughout his short video tours.

As his TikTok page continues to grow, he’s not satisfied. He wants to move onto dominating other platforms: X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram and even Facebook. He aims to hire some people to help him out: an agent, a videographer, an editor and maybe even a driver.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since he made the switch though, and he’s in no rush to change things up immediately, especially because things have been working for him so far.

“I’d rather do things right than do things quickly,” he says.

When he finally arrives at Eastern Illinois, he gets recognized by a local TV news reporter, who asks him if he’s “the guy from TikTok.” After a quick chat and with the reporter still nearby, GFed gets multiple takes of him closing his car door with a whoop, announcing his arrival at O’Brien Field in Charleston, Ill., home of the Panthers. Then, he gets several more takes of his excited reaction to the banners of two Eastern Illinois hanging from the concourse: Jimmy Garoppolo and Tony Romo.

If GFed ever gets self-conscious when he records his videos, it does not show. What’s striking about his recording is that he’s not afraid to have multiple takes of a shot in the pursuit of perfection, even if he’s only saying one or two sentences, and even if there are other people around.

The stop itself is another quick one. There’s another open gate facing the parking lot, and GFed walks through, past the aqua blue track and onto the field. A clock on the scoreboard counts down the minutes until practice, and he gets recognized once more by an employee on the field. After GFed jokes that the school needs to retire Garoppolo’s number alongside those of Romo and Sean Payton, the clock dips below 15 minutes, and more players stream out of the locker room, one of whom has a speaker.

As “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins loops for a second time, GFed heads back to the parking lot.

His final stop is at Southern Illinois, a full two and a half hours from Eastern and five-hour drive from his home base in Chicago.

On the final stretch, GFed reminisces about growing up in Lansing, Mich.

His profession as a full-time content creator seem to run in contrast to the “very country” upbringing GFed had as a child. He explains that both of his parents were raised in small towns and met in high school. His grandfather started a carpentry practice. Growing up, GFed never could have imagined that he’d reach the level of quote-unquote “fame” that he has now, with over 240,000 people following him on a rapidly growing social media page.

However, what has made him successful thus far is his unwavering commitment to keeping that continuous growth.

“I feel like I’ve done a lot, but I still think I got a lot more to do,” he says. “It’s been crazy, but at the same time, I didn’t get into making content as if I wasn’t ready to gain a bunch of followers. Like, if I’m not ready for that, then what [am I] here for, right?”

At exactly 7:20 p.m., almost 13 hours after he arrived at Northern Illinois, GFed pulls into the parking lot across from Saluki Stadium, home of the Southern Illinois University Salukis.

The sun has set, but the campus is still active on that Wednesday evening. The parking lot is about half full, and student-athletes are still pulling in and out of spots. The athletic facility across the street from the stadium shares its parking lot with the field and is attached to the Banterra Center, the Salukis’ basketball arena. The facility’s lights are on, as are those of the tennis courts bordering the stadium. The distinct popping noise of pickle ball rackets swatting balls is clear beyond the chain-link fences encircling the courts.

The lights of Saluki Stadium are off, but the field glows under a scoreboard flashing advertisements and campus news to an empty stadium. It’s the first time all day GFed has faced a challenge with no apparent open gates.

On the grass between the tennis courts and stadium is an unlocked gate. The content creator’s feet find grass, then concrete, then synthetic turf. After a long day of travel – one that featured more than 12 hours of driving in total – he’s relieved. The mission to walk onto the field at all four Illinois directional schools in fewer than 24 hours was a success.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: TikTok star GFed takes fans on the field at college football stadiums