Content-creating 'a legitimate career' for UA kicker, internet star Cash Peterman

Cash Peterman hasn’t attempted a field goal or punt in his four-year college career, yet the redshirt senior is arguably the most successful player on Arizona’s football roster in the NIL space.

Peterman’s college stats are two kickoffs and a PAT ... from the 2022 season. Peterman’s content-creating passion off the field has earned him a combined 601,900 followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Peterman has more Instagram followers (431,000) than the Arizona football account (119,000), quarterback Noah Fifita (24,000) and former UA star wide receiver and projected first-round pick Tetairoa McMillan (61,000) combined.

The comedic-style football and golf videos Peterman has posted on his wildly popular channels landed him partnerships with DoorDash, Target, Dr Pepper, Ray-Ban, Wendy’s, TCL, the NFL for Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans, Coachella, Arizona Diamondbacks, Arizona Cardinals, Nintendo, Fortnite, Great Clips, Southwest Airlines, Marriott and EA Sports’ College Football 25, among other brands and companies.

Peterman has an endorsement deal with the World Cup when it comes to North America next year and said he’s going to film content at one of the matches. Last year, Peterman was nominated for “Athlete Creator of the Year” at the NIL Summit in Atlanta.

The off-the-field popularity sunk in for Peterman when he recently went on a mini-golfing date with his wife, Emily, who Peterman met at BYU, where he spent the first two seasons of his college career before transferring to the UA in 2023.

“Five or six kids came up to us and were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re Cash!’” Peterman said. “I’m like, ‘Uh, I’m a backup kicker who just makes videos,’ but I talked to them and took pictures, all of that stuff. It’s just funny because, in my head, I have a lower expectation for myself, because I haven’t achieved all of my goals yet.”

So, how did a backup kicker become an internet star?

Peterman is named Cash after his grandfather, a former sugar beet farmer in Idaho. Peterman has another grandfather named Speed, and his brother is named Crew. Peterman grew up in Tucson and spent the first half of his high school football career at Ironwood Ridge. He kicked a game-winning 24-yard field goal to beat Tucson High 31-28 in 2015.

“That was my first big kick, so that was a monumental moment for me,” Peterman said.

After his sophomore season, Peterman moved to the Phoenix area and kicked for the state championship-winning Chandler Wolves. Before attending BYU, Peterman served his Latter-day Saints mission in 2018 and ’19.

When Peterman started his career at BYU, the “name, image and likeness” era of collegiate athletics was in the infancy stage.

“I heard the whispers of NIL and that it was going to break,” Peterman said.

He wanted in. However, kickers aren’t traditionally at the top of the list of football players to pay.

“I knew kickers weren’t going to make anything from NIL collectives or anything like that,” Peterman said. “No one’s going to pay a kicker what they’re gonna pay a quarterback. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make videos, then I’m gonna get brand deals and stuff like that.’”

Not everyone, including his wife, was on board.

“She was concerned at first,” Peterman said. “This was before it blew up to where it is. She was like, ‘Sure, but get a real job when you’re done with school.’ But now that it’s where it’s at, she’s just glad it’s more of a masculine fanbase. I think my followers are like 90% men, 10% women. She approves because of that. As long as she doesn’t have to be in the videos, she’s totally fine with it.”

The model for Peterman’s content is former UCF kicker Donald De La Haye, also known as “Deestroying,” who monetized his day-in-the-life-of-a-football player content on YouTube before the NCAA banned him and removed his scholarship in the pre-NIL era.

“I’m a young man having fun in his free time, making videos to help motivate and inspire others,” De La Haye said in 2017. “And I get deemed ineligible to continue to play college sports because of it. ... It’s about time I head down another road, I guess.”

De La Haye now has 6.2 million subscribers on YouTube; Peterman has nearly 68,000.

“Deestroying has been a good example of how to create content and run that world and he’s been so successful at it,” Peterman said.

Peterman started his content-creation journey with less than 2,000 followers and “and then just just started toying with random spaghetti ideas, threw them at the wall.”

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He married football and his passion for golf, which he discovered at BYU in Provo, Utah.

“I got addicted to it,” Peterman said. “There were some free courses up at BYU, so we’d go to practice and then go golf. We did that more than we should’ve. I took it really serious when I moved down here because, I mean, you can’t beat Arizona golf.”

Once Peterman transferred to Arizona, he partnered with Scottsdale-based PXG, the first major brand to sign Peterman as an endorser. Peterman modeled PXG’s apparel preceding the Waste Management Phoenix Open last month. Peterman has also worked with Bridgestone Golf, Vice Golf and Whirlwind Golf Club at Wild Horse Pass in Phoenix.

Fifita and other Arizona players have received golf clubs from Peterman, courtesy of his closest-to-the-pin challenges, which are sometimes filmed inside Arizona Stadium.

Peterman has also incorporated wearing football helmets in his social media videos, whether it’s on the golf course or on the football field. Peterman said, “The helmets kind of stuck, so I stuck with that, and just did game-day content and just did a bunch of random stuff.”

Like golf, Peterman’s obsession for helmets is relatively new. Peterman found a Riddell “Speed” helmet at Goodwill and wrapped the exterior in vinyl wrap for a car. It was the first helmet of the collection, “and it kind of took off.”

Peterman now has roughly 500 football helmets in a storage unit in Tucson, including UA football helmets from the Pac-10 era and a game-worn helmet from Los Angeles Rams star receiver Puka Nacua, who was teammates with Peterman at BYU. Peterman also has custom helmets from local Tucson tattoo artists, which he has promoted on his social media pages.

The helmet element to Peterman’s content has delivered him deals with Schutt, Vicis and LIGHT brands. Through Peterman, the aforementioned brands have donated several helmets to underprivileged youth in Arizona. Peterman has also done helmet giveaways for his followers.

The football helmet is part of his online identity, so in Daft Punk — or Marshmello-esque fashion, Peterman donned a gold football helmet with a dollar sign decal to match his off-white suit at the NIL Summit.

Now that Peterman has risen to internet popularity, his UA teammates “and the new transfers have seen the videos and they’re super excited and will bring me ideas and want to be in them now,” Peterman said.

“It makes it a lot easier on me and a lot more fun, because they’re not skeptical or annoyed by them,” he said.

After Peterman, who is studying marketing, is done playing football, he wants to use his platform as “the YouTube version of MTV Cribs” and create kicking and golfing videos at schools across the U.S.

Peterman said he deals with imposter syndrome daily.

“But when I get messages from high school kickers saying, ‘I just made the team! Thank you so much for your videos!’ that’s what helps me,” Peterman said.

Peterman’s advice for anyone looking to enter the content-creating realm is the same slogan as Nike — and it’s what he attributes his off-the-field success to.

“Just do it,” Peterman said. “Just post it. There’s a lot of guys with better ideas than mine. Everyone gets super excited and get some momentum going and then they get scared right before they do it and it never happens. I look at my videos from three years ago, when I first started, and they are awful. But I’m glad I did them, because I know what works and what doesn’t. Just do it and everything will fall into place right now.”

Peterman said his rise as a social media influencer “has been unreal.”

“I never would’ve expected it to be at the stage where it is right now, but it’s definitely eye-opening,” he added.

Former Arizona starting kicker Tyler Loop is preparing for the NFL, opening up a window for Peterman to contend for the starting kicker job with sophomore Michael Salgado-Medina and freshman Tyler Prasuhn, the son of former UA kicker Jon Prasuhn. Before Peterman is done at Arizona, “I want to do more on the field before I feel like I accomplished anything.”

“I want to be the starting kicker this year and do all of that and set a record for myself on the field,” Peterman said. “But I do all of this (content-creating) to provide for my wife, provide for my family and now that it has grown to where it is, it’s like a legitimate career. It’s not just making videos for fun or getting brand deals here and there. This is a job now and I have to make videos every day.

“It’s been great. I couldn’t be more grateful for it. It’s surreal that people actually know who I am and aren’t digits on a screen. It’s been really fun.”