What Only Hardcore DC Fans Notice About The Snyder Cut's Football Scene
Zack Snyder's Justice League clocked in at a whopping four hours, giving viewers a whole lot of new footage they had never seen before. Much of this extra footage was an expansion of scenes in the 2017 version of Justice League, and Snyder's cut rounded out these moments to make more complete stories.
One of the biggest changes we saw was the expanded backstory of Victor Stone a.k.a. Cyborg (Ray Fisher). We were treated to a lengthier football game than the first time around, an important conversation between him and his mother just before their accident, and Cyborg discovering his abilities. The first of the three scenes showed Victor's athleticism and passion as the star of the football team.
We've seen football before in a DC Comics film: In Christoper Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, Bane (Tom Hardy) holds an entire stadium hostage during a Gotham Knights football game. But Cyborg's scene in Zack Snyder's Justice League has to do with an entirely different football team, which has a rich history in DC Comics.
Forget the Knights, Zack Snyder's Justice League was all about the Wildcats
First things first, Victor's origin in the DC Comics is nothing like we see in Zack Snyder's Justice League. In the comics, the character suffers a horrible accident while his parents are experimenting with inter-dimensional travel in a lab, and a large gelatinous being — no, not the cube from Onward — comes through a portal and kills his mother while almost ripping him apart. This is when his father saves him by piecing him together with cybernetic parts. There is no football, no car accident, and no Mother Box experimentation in his past like the movie suggests.
In the film, Victor plays for the Gotham City Wildcats, a collegiate team that kind-of-sort-of exists in the comics. The team is actually on the professional level and appears in Manhunter #17. The Wildcats were a successful team owned by Tom Melcher and led by Coach Arthur Brockett.
One of the stars of the team was Victor Grover — not Stone — who had a metagene making him stronger and more powerful than his teammates and opponents. A coverup meant to explain his strength suggested Grover took steroids, and he was subsequently cut from the team, causing him to go into a fit of rage and take on the persona of Sportsmaster.
Sportsmaster was keen to get revenge on both Melcher and his former coach, but he was stopped by Batman and Manhunter. According to Grover's DC Fandom page, he was eventually recruited by the Suicide Squad and raided Circe's lair in what was known as the War of the Gods. Sportsmaster doesn't have much of a history beyond that and is one of the lesser-known villains in DC, but Snyder's inclusion of the Wildcat team might bring him some new attention.
Snyder's decision to use the Wildcats as a fun Easter egg to explain Victor's backstory is a nice homage to the comics, giving the team the recognition they might never have gotten from DCEU movie lovers.