What team has a Zyn-themed play call?

Hello, and welcome to your Wednesday FOIAbites. 

Today we’re talking about Zyn. You know it, you probably love it. You may even have one in your mouth right now. 

Gonna guess my readership leans Citrus. Three milligrams. 

Lemme know if I’m right. I think I am. 

I have a theory. It’s not really backed by evidence, but I doubt anyone is gonna call me a heretic after they hear it. 

I think the gums of every single college football coaching staff are stuffed to the gills with nicotine pouches. 

Those are jobs that demand focus, energy, and long hours, and the positions are filled by the kind of men (basically any man 18-55) who are the product’s power users.

And while I have no problem with the prevalence of Zyn these days, I’m really grossed out by all the men (men 18-55) who spit their used pouches into urinals.

Go into any rest stop or stadium bathroom in the past two years, and you’ll find the porcelain littered with Zyns, sitting atop neon orange urinal cakes or floating in pools of… it’s disgusting.  

There are trash cans. The pouches dissolve into nothing if you aren’t so impatient. You know how a urinal works. It isn’t a toilet. You can see before you spit if it will flush. 

This, more than people watching TikToks with sound on in the subway, is my proof the societal contract ain’t coming back.  

It also made me think that things in college locker rooms were even worse. 

Before I tried to see how bad the bathrooms were, I was hoping to find out who was really plowing through pouches. 

The only semi-confirmed proof I’ve ever found of a Zyn-addled coach is a video of Oregon’s Dan Lanning potentially popping one before a game. But that’s it. 

So I used a true scientific method. 

I started looking at pictures of offensive staff at big schools to see which ones seemed like Zyn fiends. 

(I don’t know why, maybe Kyle Shanahan is to blame for this, but I feel like offensive coaches are much more likely to be using Zyn than their defensive counterparts. Those guys are addicted to energy drinks.)

My conclusion was West Virginia. Just look at these three bros. 

But there’s a problem with getting a read on Zyn use through FOIA. You can’t do it. Even if coaches were emailing and texting about popping a pouch every two hours, those communications aren’t exactly public.

It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but only records that pertain to conducting school business are releasable.

That way, employees are free to gossip and banter and plan lunch without fear that every message could be scrutinized by the public. 

Still, FOIAball tried, asking for messages from offensive coordinators and assistants about lip pillows and upper deckers and Zynflation. We were almost completely stymied. Not entirely, though. We’ll get to that. 

We had better success looking into what annoyed us so much about Zyns. I’m pleased to report I am not alone in my anger.

Let’s head first to the University of Utah. 

There, in October 2024, the athletics department’s head custodian emailed the school’s associate AD for facilities with the subject line, “Urinals in Baseball/Men’s Swim restroom.”

Really, truly, an email so many of us are blessed to never get at our job.

“Just a heads up, as I was covering the East restrooms last week I noticed 1-2 Zyn packets in the urinals a day which can cause clogs. There was also a lack of flushing which makes preventing stains and cleaning extremely difficult.”

That sounds exactly like baseball players. But at least staff caught it before things got too bad. 

For something truly more foul, we must venture over to Idaho. At Boise State, the football team’s Zyns were constantly causing problems. 

In October 2024, a text between the football team’s chief of staff and the school's AD for operations had this graphic exchange: “Would you mind talking to the guys about spitting their ZYN into the toilets. We had a clogged urinal in the players locker room and those are what was pulled out.”

Which is absolutely gnarly. And also unclear. I can’t tell if the text message is using toilets and urinals interchangeably, saying not to spit Zyns in either, or asking players to spit their Zyns into toilets, and not urinals, where they can be more easily flushed.

We will never know, because I’ll be honest, I did not reach out to Boise State for clarification. There are plenty of journalistic lows I’ll sink to at this site, but I finally found one too far down in the gutter. 

Maybe I should have, because it kept happening. In a “Stadium Ops” chain the next month, someone inquired about another clog. 

“When its cleared, let me know if it was Zyn pouches.”

That wasn’t the end of it.

A couple months later, staffers had almost the exact same conversation. 

In February 2025, the team’s facilities manager texted, “Can we get an email sent about players spitting their zyns in the urinals please, clogged urinals.”

Poetic. Truly. 

The AD of operations passed the message along. 

“Can you relay to the players to not spit their Zyns into the urinals please. Had another clogged toilet because of it.”

That’s at least three Zyn-related clogs by our count. I’m sure there are plenty more, across the sport, that don’t wind up in the public record.

Now, you might be asking, wasn’t there a headline about Zyn-themed play? Why are you talking about bathrooms? I’ve been misled. 

That’s because, unlike Utah, I did not want to drop the word “urinal” directly into your inbox. But our inquiries about offensive staff weren’t entirely fruitless.

There was one team that had a hit.