AL.com - Why SEC GIF guru ‘LSUFreek’ disappeared

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Terrance Donnels just didn’t have it in him anymore.

The man best known as “LSUFreek” on the internet no longer had the energy or desire to spend hours creating the wackiest and funniest SEC football GIFs. No one seemed to delight SEC fanbases the way Donnels did with inspired Lane Kiffin, Les Miles and Steve Spurrier GIFs that went viral the moment he hit publish.

Only “LSUFreek” could create the now iconic GIF of a neck brace-wearing Bobby Petrino falling off his motorcycle, Bill Clinton giving him a thumbs up and a delighted Miles celebrating in the back of the car in a scene out of Seinfeld.

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But for as much joy as Donnels gave others, he no longer felt it himself. Five years ago, Donnels made the switch to hospice care at St Joseph Hospice in New Orleans, and it wore him down. He loved the work, but he felt his unique sense of humor slipping away as he lost patients day after day. He’d look back at his old GIFs and photoshops and couldn’t seem to understand what had made them so successful in the first place.

Like Michelangelo forgetting how to paint, Donnels couldn’t gauge what was funny anymore. It all felt dark.

“I really enjoy working in hospice, but man, the toll it takes on you sometimes,” Donnels says. “You’re seeing death every week. I go to work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and people are going to die. It just makes you not as funny.”

So one day, Donnels stopped.

The great creator of your favorite SEC-related GIFs in the early part of this decade largely disappeared in 2015. It prompted message board threads throughout SEC Country wondering what happened to “LSUFreek.” Outside of a few Hugh Freeze-related items when an escort scandal took down the former Ole Miss coach in July 2017, Donnels resisted weighing in on all the weirdness of college football for years. He no longer felt funny, and LSU’s struggles at the end of the Les Miles era left him uninspired.

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He genuinely appreciates the kind responses he gets, but he still has doubts. When you feel like you’ve had your funny sucked out of you when confronting death every day, it takes more than one popular GIF to feel like you’re funny again. He questions whether people still enjoy his sense of humor even as the likes and retweets roll in. He long judged his success on if his father, John Donnels, reached out to him about it. John Donnels isn’t hanging out on Twitter but when his son’s past creations were particularly popular, his friends down at the marine repair shop would tell him about it.

There is no father-son call about “Purple Reign,” his first real foray back into what made him an internet sensation. “When he calls me over one day,” Terrance says, “it’ll be a good sign I rediscovered my funny bone.”

He’s still working off the rust but trying to enjoy the LSU ride as long as he can. In the lead up to championship weekend, which features his Tigers against Georgia in the SEC Championship, Donnels does hair swaps for all the championship coaches. Not all of them are big hits but a few, like Orgeron-Kirby Smart and Dabo Swinney-Bronco Mendenhall are striking and gain traction. It’s another small win for him.

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