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Build A Raft Battle

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Five guys, a pile of scrap materials, and Class IV/V whitewater built to shred anything that isn’t seaworthy.

Dude Perfect dropped a new battle on October 26, 2021, and this one skips the trick-shot format entirely. “Build A Raft Battle” sends Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, Garrett Hilbert, and twins Cory and Coby Cotton to Riversport Rapids in Oklahoma City — an artificial whitewater course built for Olympic kayak training — where each guy has to engineer his own raft from everyday junk and then send it through churning Class IV/V rapids.

There’s no ball involved, no trick shot, no basket. The entire premise is engineering under pressure: build something buoyant enough, structurally sound enough, and fast enough to survive water that’s designed to destroy anything flimsy. The video is sponsored by SimpliSafe, but the sponsor plug takes a backseat to the raft carnage.

• Filmed entirely at Riversport Rapids in Oklahoma City, a man-made whitewater facility capable of producing Class IV/V rapids.
• All five Dude Perfect members — Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, Garrett Hilbert, Cory Cotton, and Coby Cotton — build individual rafts from homemade materials before racing them through the course.
• The video includes behind-the-scenes footage of the raft testing process along with bloopers from the whitewater runs.

The Course Doesn’t Care About Your Craftsmanship

Riversport Rapids isn’t a lazy river with a current — it’s a whitewater channel engineered to pump out rapids strong enough to flip kayaks and rafts used in actual Olympic-level training. Dropping five homemade rafts, built from whatever the crew scrounged together, into that kind of turbulence is less a race and more a structural stress test. The question up front isn’t who’s fastest, it’s who’s still floating in one piece by the time they hit the bottom of the run.

That framing is what separates this battle from the group’s usual trick-shot format. Instead of testing accuracy, it’s testing engineering — buoyancy, lashings, weight distribution, whether the thing holds together when a wall of water hits it sideways. Anyone who’s watched the channel’s past stunt builds knows the pattern: something looks fine in the driveway, then falls apart the second real conditions hit.

Homemade rafts in level 5 rapids… what could go wrong.

Five Builders, Five Different Approaches

Each guy designs and constructs his raft independently before the group heads to the rapids, which means five very different engineering philosophies collide on the same course. That’s been the throughline of Dude Perfect’s build-based battles for years — give the same five guys the same problem and watch them solve it five completely different ways, from Tyler Toney’s brute-force builds to Cory and Coby Cotton’s more calculated approach.

The behind-the-scenes segment matters here almost as much as the competition itself. Viewers get to see the actual testing phase — the failures, the patch jobs, the moments a raft takes on water before it even reaches the rapids — which is where a lot of the comedy and the bloopers come from. It’s the difference between watching a finished product and watching the process that led to it.

Integration Within the Battle Format

Dude Perfect has built an entire content ecosystem around exactly this kind of format — take a simple physical challenge, strip away the polish, and let five competitive guys turn it into chaos. Fans who’ve followed the channel’s other oversized stunts, like the group’s World’s Largest Challenge or the record-chasing setup behind their World’s Longest T-Shirt Launch Overtime episode, will recognize the same DNA — an absurd physical premise executed with total sincerity.

The whitewater setting also puts a literal spin on stakes the channel usually keeps metaphorical. There’s no “L” to take here in the usual trick-shot sense — the rapids themselves hand out the punishment, capsizing or splintering any raft that wasn’t built right, which turns the whole battle into a natural elimination system without anyone needing to keep score.

Nobody’s raft survives that course by accident — that’s really the whole point of dropping five homemade builds into water engineered to break kayaks. Expect the next battle to swing back to something drier and trick-shot-based, since Dude Perfect rarely runs the same physical-build format twice in a row, but for one video, the rapids did all the talking.