The story behind Tai Felton's viral draft day video
Director Albert Tong breaks down his documentary feature that shared Felton's dramatic draft day
By Matthew Coller
A few days after the NFL Draft, I woke up to a message from a Minnesota Vikings fan that caught my eye.
“Have you seen this video? Tai Felton might be my new favorite player,” the message said.
As often is the case on social media, someone had clipped a two-minute segment from a YouTube video showing the emotional moments leading up to Felton being selected by the Vikings with the 102nd pick — the last selection of Day 2 of the draft.
What caught my eye was that the video showed Felton walking to his car and it included audio of him talking with someone inside the car about the emotions of waiting to be drafted. It struck me as an unusual level of access and a surprisingly raw moment. There is a lot of content made these days that falls under the “hype video” category that often washes over anything that could be perceived as negative. I would have expected to see Felton and his family celebrating but not the anguishing hours that went by as a house full of people waited anxiously for him to be selected.
So I went in search of the full video. What I found was a documentary series produced by the Maryland athletic department called Unlocked. The video, however, did not look or feel like something that was produced in-house. With all respect to the talented folks around the country producing content for universities, this viewing experience was more like watching an ESPN 30 for 30 doc. It captured Felton’s life story, ups and downs, and followed the frustration and celebration of draft night in a cinematic way that we have come to expect from films like The Last Dance or The U.
Turns out the man behind the video is named Albert Tong. He acted as the director and editor of this 15:53 piece that instantly connected Vikings fans with their newest player.
Tong has only been at Maryland for about the last year-and-a-half. His journey to Maryland would remind you of the movie The Fabelmans. When Tong was in high school, he started his own company filming weddings. He used the wedding shoots to learn filmmaking techniques and to prove to his parents that he could actually make money with film. It also gave him an excuse to buy really cool gear.
In college at the University of Florida, Tong broke into sports working for a summer at CBS Sports and then got an opportunity to intern at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. One of his first chances to make documentary-style content came when the museum sent him to Alaska, Colorado and Louisiana to work on a doc about America’s water.
“That made me think that documentary was kind of cool and I really liked it,” Tong said over the phone. “For eight years I was just around the Smithsonian doing these smaller documentaries around the country. I was thrust at a young age into ‘you can just be the guy.’ Write it, direct it, edit it, one-man-band the whole thing. My whole career has made me into a Swiss Army Knife.”
As a sports fan, he marveled at the flood of great documentaries that have come out in the last decade. He couldn’t get enough of Last Chance U and Hard Knocks. So when he saw a job opportunity as an associate director of a documentary series at Maryland pop up, he thought it would be the perfect chance to meld his documentary-making skills with the sports he loved.
While in-house content has become very common at major universities, having a filmmaker on campus aiming to go further in depth than the typical hype video is still unique. It took Tong a while to build a trusting relationship with head coach Mike Locksley and his players.
“I had to speak in front of the entire team at the beginning of the season and let them know who I was,” Tong said. “I said, ‘guys I just want to let you know that I’m not a sports filmmaker, I’m filmmaker doing sports.’ I think that changed how coach saw me and I think the whole room saw what I wanted to accomplish.”
Six months into his time at Maryland, Tong was bumped up to the director of creative video for the football team. Normally that wouldn’t have included doing Unlocked but he wanted to take it with him.
“That was my carrot,” he said. “It’s what I want to do, it’s what I wake up in the morning thinking about.”
One of the players who Tong formed a bond with throughout last season was Tai Felton.
“He was always a really, really humble kid, I connected with him right away,” Tong said.
Throughout the season, as Felton was having his breakout 96-catch season with the Terrapins, Tong noticed that the blazing-fast wide receiver had a habit of catching 10,000 tennis balls a week. Felton let Tong film him doing his early-morning tennis ball routine one day and the filmmaker began to grab and store snippets of Felton’s workouts and memorable moments throughout the 2024 season, including at the Senior Bowl and mic’ing up his mother as he ran a sub-4.4 40-yard dash a the NFL Combine.
By the time the draft came around, it became clear that there was a good chance he would be picked on Day 2 of the draft. They had built enough of a friendship that Felton and his family agreed to let Tong and two others into their house on draft night to capture his journey. They had no idea how dramatic the night would end up being.
When Tong and his small team got there, they were told that things might play out quickly. He could get taken early in the second round and they would be on their way back to D.C. from Felton’s Ashburn, Virginia, home within an hour.
That was not at all how it worked out.
Tong estimated that there were 150 people that came for Felton’s draft party. They packed his living room and kitchen areas, created a whole other watch party in the basement and spilled out into the back yard. Felton was parked on the couch with his mom and his agent. At first, the enthusiasm was high but as the picks came off the board, a sense of nervousness came over the house.
“The whole second round goes by and the energy shifts in the whole room,” Tong said. “There is a thing that maybe [his draft stock] was overestimated, what do we really know? His agent is talking furiously with Tai’s mom and dad like, ‘we still have all these chances.’”
The hours started to drag on. Tong and his production assistant Noah Vasington started switching on and off with breaks to get something to eat. Pick after pick painstakingly came off the board without Felton’s phone ringing. Tong started thinking: If Felton doesn’t get selected, this is going to be a long, sad car ride home for him, Vasington and Maryland director of photography Mackenzie Miles.
“The documentary side of things starts to kick in, like let’s just document this for what it is,” Tong said. “At the end of the day let’s tell a truthful account of what it was. So we’re filming around and getting reactions. I told Noah, ‘if you see people looking nervous, capture it. It might be uncomfortable but just capture it.’”
Into the middle of the third round, Felton got up from the couch and walked outside. Vasington instinctively jumped up to see where he was going. This is where the viral part of the video happened. They still had a microphone on Felton so Vasington could hear what was being said when Felton was sitting in his car receiving encouragement from someone. At that point, his agent asked them to come back inside and leave Felton alone.
When he returned to the couch, the video team was thinking about packing up their gear.
“We were pretty devastated for Tai,” Tong said.
At one point, Shannon says to a friend that she is going to be the one to address the huge crowd if he doesn’t get drafted. As much as Tai is the center of the piece, Shannon is the star of the video.
Sitting in front of Kobe Bryant’s book on her shelf, she talks about Tai growing up and having “happy feet” as a kid because he was always running everywhere. She tells the story of Tai tearing his ACL and having a scholarship offer from Virginia Tech rescinded.
Tong explained the relationship between Tai and his mom:
“Dude, Tai’s mom is a force. She is super generous. Tai’s mom, you can tell that she has a strength about her that is unique. It comes from going through a lot of s—. She’s from L.A. originally and her whole mindset has really been like a Kobe mindset and I think that’s been instilled with Tai. Before games sometimes I’d see him at his locker and he’d put up a picture of Kobe and he would say, ‘that comes straight from my mom, we’re so Mamba mentality, the two of us.’”
Both of their strength was tested in the waning moments of the third round. Luckily some of the cool technology that the crew had in its possession was a camera with a “pre-roll” function. That meant it recorded the three seconds before the record button was actually pushed down. When Felton’s phone rang, the camera grabbed just enough to see the moment he picked up and put it to his ear with the Vikings brass on the other side.
“We get just a quick moment, a millisecond before he actually picks up the phone and brings it to his ear,” Tong said. “All of the sudden the whole house goes dead quiet and once it happens everyone just goes [crazy] with ‘let’s go Tai, let’s go, you’ve got this, let’s go 10.’”
Suddenly Tong found himself in the middle of pandemonium.
“We were just mobbed as everyone is trying to hear this phone call and then we realize it’s going to happen and then the pick came in and the place went absolutely wild,” he said. “The shots you see in the video is me double-wielding two cameras. One is our tripod camera that I’m hoisting with my left arm and with my right arm I’m vying for space with my original camera. It’s me with two cameras mobbed around me with people pushing and screaming. We rolled for 45 minutes straight of just screaming, congratulations, crying, the speeches that came after. That was the story of that night’s journey.”
At the end, Felton’s mom, who admitted in the video that she was conveying strength on the outside despite suffering on the inside for Tai, said that she wouldn’t change a thing about the way it played out. Tong feels the same way.
“I wouldn’t change a thing either,” he said. “The way it went down was so appropriate with the story of Tai and all the adversity he’s gone through his whole life and for it to be the last pick of that day and be this moment of huge triumph — if he had gone high in the second it would be fantastic but this was such a way to go. I hope it signifies something that will be a moment that he looks back two, three, five years down in his career like, what an insane thing, ‘I didn’t need another chip on my shoulder but thank you.’”
After 45 minutes of sheer madness, the small crew got back in the car. They spent the entire time brainstorming ideas. Tong felt the weight of the SD cards in his cameras, knowing they were filled with gold. You can’t script drama like that.
The video has more than 20,000 views on Twitter/X and approximately 21,000 more on YouTube. A decade ago, this type of content might not have been possible but in today’s college universe where recruiting has become more and more competitive, having in-house media that can create a 30 for 30 caliber documentary is an advantage for Maryland. Who wouldn’t want their own story told this way?
“It would be a dream come true if the stuff we make can contribute to the recruiting. If it could be a tool that kids could look at it and be like, ‘look at the depth that they tell these stories, it’s not just surface level,’… stuff that can have real, tangible impact,” Tong said.
From a Vikings perspective, no press conference or interview about his draft night and excitement to enter the NFL could have shown his new fan base what they are getting in Felton quite like Unlocked.
What did he learn about Felton in the process?
“What I learned from being around him and his family is that the Vikings are getting a village coming with Tai,” Tong said. “All the people in that room and probably more, they are going to be mega fans.”
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