Chase Daniel had an up-and-down day in Lincoln, Neb.

On the plus side, the Missouri quarterback threw for 244 yards and two touchdowns Nov. 4, and broke his school’s single-season record for passing yards. But he also threw a pair of interceptions, and his Tigers suffered a 34-20 loss to Nebraska.

The real downer, though, came after the game.

During the ABC telecast, cameras caught Daniel on the bench for a moment more embarrassing than any interception. Shot from behind, the sophomore signal caller could be seen reaching for his nose, peering at his finger, then bringing his hand to his mouth.

Those eight seconds were all it took for Daniel to become the unfortunate star in a video called “Chase Daniel likes boogers,” complete with sound effects.

The clip – and two copycats – were viewed a combined 80,000 times in their first five days on YouTube, an Internet video site that is changing the landscape of sports highlights by allowing users to upload clips of everything from high school volleyball to obscene on-ice trash talk from the 1991 Stanley Cup Finals.

If you don’t believe it, just ask Lamar Thomas, the broadcaster whose inflammatory comments during the Miami-Florida International brawl last month may have blown over had they not popped up on YouTube for the world to see and hear.

Instead, there was an uproar that didn’t end until Thomas was fired.

The site is also making waves outside of sports. A YouTube video showing a police officer hitting a suspect in the face three months ago in Los Angeles has led to an FBI investigation into the officer’s use of force.

YouTube, which was purchased for $1.65 billion last month by Google, has become the place to go on the Internet to see crazy things from the world of sports. The clips are not necessarily easy to find – you have to know what you’re looking for – but once something becomes a hit, it spreads to other Web sites, thanks to an interface that allows bloggers to post YouTube videos on their own sites with ease.

“One of the funnier things was when Denis Leary showed up in the booth at a Red Sox game and he did a great thing on Kevin Youkilis and Mel Gibson,” says Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch, who posted the YouTube video of it on his site. “If you weren’t a Red Sox fan, if not for YouTube, that would have been lost.”

Copyright catastrophe

It’s not all laughs and giggles, though: Because the Leary routine took place on a Red Sox broadcast, it is copyrighted material owned by Major League Baseball, which has its own video presence on the Web and aggressively searches YouTube for clips that violate that copyright, and then has the offending clips removed.

“We have a relationship with Google, YouTube, Yahoo, where we say that’s our copyright, and they quickly take it down,” says MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman. “We don’t have a philosophical issue about who owns the material, and that’s where these sites are going: user-generated content, not user-stolen content.”

That doesn’t mean that YouTube will soon be a site only for homemade highlights. YouTube already has a deal with CBS that has brought classic March Madness highlights to the site, and YouTube VP of content Kevin Donahue says the company is working on deals with professional leagues to put highlights on the site.

“Our goal is to create an environment where people come to YouTube to get the highlights and content (the rightsholders are) providing,” Donahue says. “It’s going to grow with the community looking for that content.”

As an example of how popular legitimate content with a league or network brand name behind it can be, Donahue can point to the early success of the CBS deal. There’s probably not a sports fan alive who hasn’t seen Christian Laettner’s game-winning shot against Kentucky in 1992, but in less than a month since CBS posted the clip on YouTube, it has received more than 138,000 views.