Always Remember the Butt Fumble
The Patriots play the Jets tonight, marking the first time the two teams have met since this happened:
Yes, the butt fumble. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a year, but time flies when you’re obsessing over one man dropping a football after running into another man’s buttocks. Believe it or not, el fumblé de butt was back in the news (sort of) last week when SportsCenter decided to officially retire the infamous play after 40 straight weeks of being voted to the number one spot on the show’s “Not Top 10: Worst of the Worst” countdown. “We are retiring it this week due to the start of a new NFL season, and the feeling that it was time to start fresh,” NESN quotes ESPN senior coordinating producer Mark Summer as saying. “The butt fumble has won the ‘Not Top 10’ each week since last Thanksgiving, and we’re not sure anything could top it.”
Reflecting on this moment, SI notes that the butt fumble managed to beat out Carly Rae Jepsen’s physics defying ceremonial first pitch and Heat fans leaving early from Game 6 of this year’s NBA Finals in the Not Top 10 countdown. Thus is the magnificent power of the butt fumble.
To commemorate its retirement, ESPN commissioned a SportsScience piece, breaking down the physics behind Mark Sanchez’s ultimate blooper. (Spoiler alert: according to science, when someone runs into somebody else’s backside with force, sometimes they drop the thing they’re carrying.)
But what’s amazing is the whole world that’s sprung up around the butt fumble. It has its own Wikipedia page, totaling nearly 2,300 words. This guy made a custom butt fumble jersey, but if you don’t feel like going to all that effort, you can simply buy a butt fumble T-shirt. USA Today recommends watching it while synced up with Mozart. There’s a YouTube remix in the style of an old-time silent film, one with Benny Hill music, and surely many more. And then there are all the memes …
So you see, ESPN, you can try to retire the butt fumble all you want. But the butt fumble will live on forever.
