The premise is simple and slightly insane: 8 pros, 8 Barstool guys, 8 Barstool girls, run through a combine, a draft, and then a single-elimination tournament, live on Stool After Dark. Chase Budinger, the former NBA forward who reinvented himself as an Olympic beach volleyball player, headlined the pro side alongside Connor Griffin, who's no stranger to sand himself after competing in Chicago's Charlie Saikley 6-Man tournament earlier this year.
Beach Volleyball Pro-Am Tournament featuring Chase Budinger and Connor Griffin goes live at 5 pm Eastern on @StoolAfterDark Nick Turani and White Sox Dave on the call
By the time the broadcast kicked off with Nick Turani and White Sox Dave calling the action, the format had already delivered exactly what a combine-draft-tournament promises: total chaos. The pros weren't there to take it easy on the Barstool side, and the footage backed that up.
The beach volleyball pros are already out to get Tate tonight
Budinger's presence gives the whole thing more legitimacy than your average Barstool stunt stream. He went from a seven-year NBA career with the Rockets, Timberwolves, Pacers and Suns to full-time beach volleyball, eventually qualifying for the Paris Olympics — making him the only athlete to ever play in both an NBA regular season game and an Olympic beach volleyball match. That's not a guy walking through a pro-am for a paycheck; that's someone who could genuinely embarrass a field of amateurs if he wanted to.
Once the tournament itself went single elimination, the broadcast leaned fully into its After Dark identity — which means somebody was going to argue with the referee eventually.
Wouldn’t be an After Dark stream without an argument with the ref
Not everyone watching was sold on the matchup being fair in the first place. One fan summed up the skepticism plainly, framing the whole thing as a mismatch before it even got going.
Volleyball stream vs 8 pro volleyball players and this is supposed to be out volleyball guy. Live here t.co/Fq3xgyW3XM
That's kind of the point, though — the entertainment value here isn't watching Barstool talent hang with actual pros, it's watching them try. Whether the bracket produced an upset or a predictable pro sweep wasn't confirmed in real time, but the format itself — a live combine turning into a bracketed tournament on a Wednesday night stream — is the kind of low-stakes, high-chaos programming Stool After Dark has built its identity on.