Ricky Cobb Of Super 70s Sports Signs Deal With OutKick

For Ricky Cobb, the founder of the Super 70s Sports Twitter account, today is the culmination of a lifetime spent consuming sports.

OutKick announced Monday that Cobb has signed a deal to host a new daily show launching later this summer that will be an extension of the humor and expansive sports and culture knowledge that he’s highlighted via his incredibly successful social media account.

(Ricky Cobb of Super 70s Sports is bringing his encyclopedia of sports knowledge to OutKick where he will develop a daily show, the company announced Monday.)

"It's time for a new challenge. It's time to flex other muscles," Cobb said from his home in Chicago where he works as a sociology professor at Moraine Valley Community College. "The Twitter/X platform is awesome, and it's been so good to me. It's given me an opportunity to entertain people, make connections and friendships. All that good stuff, but there's so much more you can do in this format that I'm going to have. It's the opportunity I've wanted for quite some time. 

"I think OutKick is the perfect place for me to call home at this point."  

Why would Cobb, who is two decades into a teaching career, bet on himself and a new daily Internet show at this point in life?

"Most people get to the age I am, and you’re like, ‘This it it,’ right? This is my career," the father of five said. "I, in midlife, get to embark on a dream job. I hope there’s never a day that goes by that I don’t remind myself that I’m very lucky to do something I’m passionate about, and I’m excited to get up and do every day."

Once you hear the Ricky Cobb story, it all starts to make sense why he’s about to talk sports, culture and entertainment on a daily basis.

He’s trained his whole life for this moment.

Before you start thinking that Cobb is just some guy in Chicago who memorized a bunch of old sports names and came up with a fun Twitter account, you need to hear him speak in his southern drawl. That’s not a Chicagoan by birth, folks. It’s just where his career took him years ago. 

"Twenty-one years in Chicago and this is where the accent has settled," the Horse Cave, Kentucky native (pop. 2,000 when he was growing up there in the early 1980s) explained. "It’s probably not as dramatic as it was in 2003 (when he arrived in Chicago). Those first 32 years in Kentucky are going to follow me through the rest of my life."

That’s right, OutKick’s new show host grew up in a town with a weird name — "Horse Cave sounds like a wrestler gimmick. It’s like where Hillbilly Jim from the WWF would've been from," Cobb joked — where the biggest entertainment comes in the form of dark caves and a McDonald’s 2 1/2 miles outside of town near an exit ramp for I-65 which runs between Louisville and Nashville. There wasn’t much going on in Horse Cave for young Ricky, who’s an only child.

In 1982, life changed when his family got cable television. This moment triggered everything. Sports became his passion, his love, his reason for being. He couldn't get enough.

Then, in 1986 or 1987, his life changed forever when his family upgraded to a satellite dish.

"We got one of those ginormous yard satellite dishes. The one that you’d tune it, and it would actually turn towards different places in the stars to connect with different satellites," Cobb noted. 

Hold up, let me stop you right there, Ricky. Let’s see how much knowledge is up in your brain.

"I’m going to give you a name and you tell me how he died," I interrupted. "Bo Diaz."

"Crushed by a satellite dish!" Ricky fired back while laughing hysterically.

Ricky’s family had a dish similar to the one that took Diaz, a former Reds catcher. RIP, Bo.

"We had one of those big ones. I put that thing to good use back in the day when it was the Wild West. The Playboy Channel wasn’t even scrambled," Cobb continued. "You’d have the raw feeds of all these games. You’d be listening to what the announcers were saying to each other during commercial breaks. It was like being there with them listening to these guys bitching and complaining to one another."

The satellite dish couldn’t have come into Ricky’s life at a better time. As a free agent baseball fan who didn’t have a hometown team to root for — the Reds were a three-plus our drive; going to Riverfront was a once-a-year luxury — he could live life as a "sports generalist," as he calls himself. That’s what led to his love of the Montreal Expos.

"For a kid from Horse Cave, KY, they were exotic. I remember going to Riverfront Stadium in 1983 and seeing the Reds play the Expos who had Raines, Carter and Dawson. They had those pinwheel hats. The road blues. I loved their uniforms," Cobb explained.

"And then they played ‘O Canada’ before the game. I thought that was somethin’."

Soon, Ricky was watching French broadcasts of Expos games and loving it: "I was fascinated by it."

His fascination with sports only grew from there. Ricky is the first one to admit that he wasn’t a great student and swears he never took a textbook home his entire high school career. "I used to buy the USA Today and take it to school with me. I’d fold it out so I could read the entire sports page while my teachers were teaching," OutKick’s new show host added.

Between the satellite dish, the USA Today sports section and dice sports games Ricky created in his head to keep him busy, he was building the basis for what would become a social media cultural phenomenon with Super 70s Sports. Ricky just didn’t know what all this knowledge he was gaining would turn into one day.

"It looked like I was wasting my time probably more than anyone else but in a weird way I was just preparing myself for who I became a long time later," he concluded.

"I can’t remember where my garage remote, but if you want to know what Rod Carew’s batting average was in 1977, I can tell you he hit .388."