College football and the NFL are finally back, and I guess Uber Eats was right: Football really is for food.
That’s in reference to a trending, food-based lexicon within American football culture, where the most unserious sandwich combinations are being created to slander QBs.
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“Meatball sub” has become the new term in football at the moment to describe the QB throwing an interception. It doesn’t have to be a meatball sub per se, and it’s funnier the more ridiculous the combination is. As one guy in my fantasy football group chat described during a Week 1 game between the Cleveland Browns and Jacksonville Jaguars, “Watson with the early pastrami on pumpernickel.”
The term “meatball” has been around in sports for a while, exclusively in baseball, where throwing a meatball meant the pitcher threw an easy-to-hit pitch down the middle to the batter. Because footballs are oblong-shaped, the closet term for those stealing from Baseball Twitter would be a meatball sub sandwich and thus sandwiches in general.
The idea of referring to a QB interception as a sandwich is catching on this season, but it’s not necessarily new. The earliest reference I could find is this 2023 tweet: “They got Carr in 4K throwing a fully loaded shrimp poboy.” Which is both delicious and clever, as Derek Carr was the QB for the New Orleans Saints that year.
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Slander in sports discourse is always evolving (re: football terrorism). These kinds of jokes and memes are usually about poor performance, i.e., playing so badly that people begin to assume you’re going to be out of the league soon. For years now, in the NBA, several memes, bad photoshops, and copypastas have circulated about NBA flameouts taking their talents to “lesser leagues” like the Chinese Basketball Association. “Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy,” and “welcome to the Shanghai Sharks” are perfect examples of this.
As of late, especially in football circles, since there’s really no NFL equivalent outside of America, flaming out of the NFL means dusting off your resume to apply for fast food jobs. Case in point: part of the reason sandwiches are being used to refer to interceptions is Patriots QB Drake Maye.
He was already being slandered in the offseason after a poor performance against the Seahawks at the Super Bowl. Which was a great hate-watch for those who A) didn’t like the Patriots being good again so soon after Tom Brady and Bill Belichick retired, and B) had mixed feelings about Maye being #2 in MVP voting in just his second season in the league.
Additionally, over the last few years, Maye has appeared at local Jersey Mike’s locations in the Boston area in collaboration with a charity he’s partnered with. So, when Maye faced off against the Seahawks last week in a Super Bowl rematch to kick off the NFL season, he had a disastrous game with three interceptions, thus truly starting the sandwich slander on football Twitter.
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Will this related trend term last past Week 1 of the season? Maybe, but probably not. People are already kind of sick of it, but it will be a fun addition to those “This season was GENERATIONAL 😭🙏” comp videos that get made at the end of the season.
Source: https://mashable.com/life/drake-maye-meatball-sub-nfl-term-explainer
