Happy 4th Anniversary To The Butt Fumble, The Jets-iest Play Of All Time

Never forget.

Pro sports fandom is very much about screaming for success. Pro sports themselves though, are more often than not about failure. Every season has just one champ, meaning a couple dozen other teams failed to win. The best hitter in baseball hit .348 in 2016, which means he didn't even hit safely 60% of his official at-bats. If you're lucky, your success is historic and puts you in a pantheon of champions who'll be talked about for generations. There's only so much success to go around though, and much, much more failure. However, if you're really, really lucky, and you fail hard enough, your failure will transcend the simple act of fucking up and become truly iconic. For Mark Sanchez and the Jets, that play is the Butt Fumble, which happened four Thanksgiving games ago but still hasn't lost any of its hilarity.

If you'd like to get technical, the actual anniversary of the fumble was on November 22nd. But the Butt Fumble will forever be associated with the league's slate of Thanksgiving games, and you're probably reading this in a turkey coma anyway.

The Butt Fumble if you've somehow never seen it, is an incredible feat of anti-skill. Jets QB Mark Sanchez, after screwing up a handoff, tried to run ahead a couple yards and slide to safely down himself. Instead he slid directly into offensive lineman Bradon Moore's ass, losing the ball which was recovered by the Patriots and run back 30 yards for a touchdown.

It's of course, bad enough to panic after a broken play. It's bad enough to slide into your offensive lineman as a result of that broken play and fumble the ball. It keeps getting worse though, if you slide into your offensive lineman and fumble the ball as a result of that broken play and see the other team recover it. It's much, much worse, to slide into your own offensive lineman because of a broken play, fumble the ball, watch the other team recover it and then score a touchdown. Add to all of that the fact that it happened in primetime, during the Thanksgiving game, on national television, when all of America was watching. It's like Dayenu but instead of God providing blessings, he's just burying you under another foot of dirt with each verse.

If you listen closely to the video, at the five-second mark, right after Sanchez plows himself into his offensive lineman's butt, you can hear Chris Collinsworth let out a plaintive "Oh no." Collinsworth isn't a hometown announcer trying to feel for the fans subjecting themselves to this. He's a former player, who no doubt recognizes that he's just seen something no one had ever done before (in a bad way) and is about to get so much worse as a Patriots defender picks up the ball with a clear field ahead of him.

It's honestly not as if the Jets hadn't been subjected to ridiculous and improbable twists of fate before. The team has a long legacy of failure, from the time they blew a 10-point lead in a 1986 playoff game, highlighted by a roughing the passer call late in the game that gave the Browns new life to the time they fell for a fake spike in the waning seconds of a game agains the Dolphins. There's the fact that they haven't made a Super Bowl, much less won one, since 1969. The times they traded for an over-the-hill Brett Favre one year and an undercooked Tim Tebow another. The time they gave up a 99-yard touchdown to the Giants on third down on Christmas Day.

These are all normal-ish failures though, things that could happen to any team, but, uh, just haven't. The Butt Fumble though, is a simple shorthand, a way to explain to someone who's not a football person why people are laughing at you because you're a Jets fan. It's football as Benny Hill:

Champions get parades, yes and champions get fun swag that says WORLD CHAMPS. But the Butt Fumble lives on as a constant irritant to Bill Belichick, as a throwaway joke in tributes to actually good teams and as a reminder that failure can be more imemorable than success.