Ricky Cobb has a fondness for dangerous playground equipment and cars without seatbelts. His hero is Kelly Leak, the bad-boy star player from “The Bad News Bears,” and he celebrates photos of beer league softball teams as precious artifacts.
For years, Mr. Cobb, 54, has been sharing his love for sports and culture from his childhood in the 1970s with an online following that also relishes the absurdities of that bygone era.
A former sociology professor at a community college in Illinois, Mr. Cobb has managed to attract nearly 800,000 followers on X by mining his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure sports stars and photo archives of bad haircuts, Kmart parking lots and professional athletes smoking on the sidelines.
Posting as @Super70sSports, Mr. Cobb pairs photos with captions that speak to the little boy (mostly) and girl of a certain generation that grew up scouring the Sunday newspaper’s agate page for every major leaguer’s batting average, and made “Battle of the Network Stars” appointment TV.
Mr. Cobb’s fans say he celebrates an era in American life that seems less uptight and more fun. His humor unapologetically glosses over the realities of the 1970s in favor of irreverent quips about fashion, cars and childhood. He estimates that 90 percent of his fans are men.
Mr. Cobb has built that following into a mini-empire, where he earns money from T-shirt sales and revenue from his traffic on X. He has since left his teaching job to focus full time on his influencer work. He teamed up with the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to produce a nostalgia-driven show called “Super Maximum Retro Show” for Vice TV, which premiered in March 2023 but lasted only one season.
More recently, he landed a show on the Fox streaming site OutKick, which bills itself as an “antidote to the mainstream sports media that often serves an elite, left-leaning minority.”
Mr. Cobb says he tries to stay away from politics on his show. Still, he has earned the ire of critics on the right for working with Mr. Kimmel and from the left for having a show on the conservative OutKick platform. Mr. Cobb says he is focused only on being funny.
Mr. Cobb looks more like the community college professor he used to be than the social media influencer he became: He has shoulder-length hair streaked with strands of gray, a preference for flannel shirts and an accent as rich as the bluegrass in his native Kentucky.
His career arc has been a series of fits and starts. He grew up in Horse Cave, Ky., a rabid sports fan and horrible high school student. His books never came home from his locker, and his classroom time consisted of folding the sports pages of The Louisville Courier Journal and USA Today into quadrants for surreptitious reading.
After barely graduating, Mr. Cobb and a partner opened a storefront in town that sold baseball cards, compact discs and anything else they could find. “It was in the days that $68 could last you eight months,” he said.
Mr. Cobb decided he needed more. He was 24 when he entered Western Kentucky University and found his calling in education. He earned a master’s degree at the University of Louisville, but did not want to pursue a Ph.D. He chose a tenure-track position teaching sociology at Moraine Valley Community College in a Chicago suburb, he said, because the city offered the best proximity to all four major league sports.
In 2015, after more than a decade in the classroom and seeking a creative outlet, Mr. Cobb decided to try his hand posting about sports on Twitter.
In the early days, Mr. Cobb posted 30 to 45 times a day. Inspiration came to him at the grocery store, in bed, at ball games, even in the bathroom.
“It became the rhythm and fabric of my life,” he said. “I’m the busiest guy that looks like he’s doing nothing but impersonating a 14-year-old on his phone.”
The divorced father of five daughters ages 13 to 23, he initially decided to keep his day job teaching sociology while he found his voice as an influencer.
Over time, Mr. Cobb has developed a persona as a more upbeat Gary Larson, the creator of “The Far Side,” with his own vernacular and heroes. “Heaters” or “lung darts” are cigarettes and feel authentic with the tobacco advertising of that era.
To Mr. Cobb, the greatest baseball team is the Bad News Bears from the 1976 film. When he posts about Morris Buttermaker, the team’s alcoholic coach, and his band of misfit players, Mr. Cobb’s fans often post their own Little League team photos from the era. Beer league softball teams also hold a hallowed place in his followers’ firmament.
Slowly, Mr. Cobb built an audience that reliably got bigger every time a celebrity discovered him and reposted his fond but often skewed view of the sports and TV shows they grew up on. The actors Rob and Chad Lowe were early adopters and struck up a friendship with Mr. Cobb.
The demographic of his feed is composed largely of millennials to baby boomers, but he recently discovered that Paul Skenes, the 23-year-old pitching ace for the Pittsburgh Pirates, follows him.
One of Mr. Cobb’s longest running riffs is his longstanding crush on the actress Lynda Carter, and he often posts pictures of her in Wonder Woman gear. He calls them “Lynda Carter breaks.”
Once, when Mr. Cobb announced to his followers that he was taking a rare day off, he was floored when Ms. Carter, out of the blue, responded to his post.
“I’ll take it from here, Ricky,” Ms. Carter wrote on X. “Enjoy your day off.”
One fan, Rex Crum, 58, said Mr. Cobb took him back to an era when reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Partridge Family” were his after-school babysitter, and “The Six Million Dollar Man” solved all the world’s problems at night. “It was an easier life,” said Mr. Crum. “It was a time everything you did was fun.”
Brent Pakkala said Mr. Cobb’s feed was essential to recovering from a massive heart attack two and a half years ago.
“He has an irreverent humor that doesn’t go over the line,” said Mr. Pakkala, who coaches junior college baseball in Minnesota. “It’s like he’s in the head of every one of his followers.”
Mr. Cobb, who left teaching in 2024, says he now earns six figures — more than he did a as a professor — and recently moved from an apartment to a house whose back porch looks over a large pond.
“I make less than you think, but more than I ever thought I would,” he said.
At a recent Super Bowl, Mr. Cobb found himself interviewing the New York Giants Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor, a player he admired growing up.
“When you’re a lifelong fan, a community college professor, and you find yourself across Lawrence Taylor,” he said, “it’s a day that feels like you’ve sort of figured life out.”
Joe Drape is a Times reporter writing about how the intersection of money, power and sports impacts our culture.
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