The Loop

Jimmy Fallon, up to his old tricks, blackmailed NFL players into saying some crazy stuff this weekend

November 17, 2020

Jimmy Fallon is what you might call an instigator. He loves to poke the bear and when the bear turns around, point at the other guy and make a face like “it was him.” That’s Jimmy Fallon. So this weekend, when we heard some of the NFL’s best and brightest saying some awful weird sh*t—some even repeating each other’s zany lines across time zones—we immediately knew who was behind it: Ol’ Slick Jimmy, who had put NFL stars up to another edition of Drop It In much to delight of the internet and, especially, Slick Jimmy himself. Go ahead, check it out.

At this point you have to ask what sort of dirt Fallon has on these guys to get them to say this stuff with no guarantee that anyone else is going to participate. For all they know, they say something like “must be maple syrup, because butter don’t drizzle like that” and suddenly they’re the only dummy who went along with it. Now their face is plastered all over Late Night TV as Fallon giggles uncontrollably behind his desk and the entire NFL fills its tank with premium unleaded trash-talk fuel. That’s a bad example, because that’s Gronk’s line and we promise you he does not give a single F, but still, you get the picture.

In the end, though, what makes all this worth a watch is not the goofy lines or the cringey second-hand embarrassment, but the opportunity to see football players lighten up and laugh at themselves a little bit. This is a sport where alpha posturing is not just the status quo, but the only means of survival. If you don’t pound your chest after every batted ball and growl through every press conference, you’ll be eaten alive by the next bigger, badder animal. So when DK Metcalf—arguably the biggest, baddest animal in the league right now—gets up there and starts waxing rhapsodic about Pokemon, well, we can’t help but smile, even if we know that Fallon is lurking somewhere in shadows, clutching a file full of incriminating photos, grinning like a madman.