Professional football is overstuffed with idioms and cliches. Analysts, coaches and players will wax poetic about how it’s a game of two halves that’s fought in the trenches and how they can only take things one play at a time to avoid a trap game.


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But Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur has the distinct honor of unleashing the strangest idiom in NFL history way back in 2021 when he said that his team “has got to wake up with their piss hot.”



You read that right. So does the Green Bay coach really believe that boiling urine is a necessary part of earning a victory? Of course not, he’s simply trying to make a point. However, nobody really understood what that point was, so, naturally, a reporter asked him what the hell he meant when he declared the need for his players to “wake up with their piss hot.”


“It’s just a mentality. … It should be naturally hot, right?” LaFleur clarified.


Uh, I guess so? But with all due respect to LaFleur, this explanation brought me no closer to understanding the meaning of this pee-themed idiom. Is it a regional phrase? Is it an overlooked quote from The Art of War? Did someone trick LaFleur into believing this was a thing people say?


Maybe the internet can help. I started with a three-year-old Reddit post about the quote but, sadly, everyone seemed just as perplexed as me by LaFleur’s desire to lead a hot-piss squad. The only “answers” were obviously jokes because it’s Reddit. Case in point: “Chlamydia,” one user wrote. “Chlamydia is how you get your piss hot, Matt.”



Assuming that LaFleur wasn’t encouraging his players to contract sexually transmitted diseases to gain a competitive edge, the best theory I was able to find was from urologist Ravi Munver. “I just think this phrase means that you want to be really fired up,” Munver told Sports Illustrated. “Have energy. Be working out, sweating. You want your body temperature to be up.”


Unlike a much-needed release of hot piss in the morning, this answer isn’t all that satisfying. Likely, there is no real answer because, despite Munver’s valiant efforts, the quote doesn’t make a lick of sense.


But in a piss-warming twist of fate, the ridiculous nature of the quote has caused it to become a rallying cry for the Packers fanbase, who will regularly reference LaFleur’s unique turn of phrase as a way to cheer on their team.


And it’s even been embraced by the team itself, as the Packers’ official Twitter account now proudly uses hot piss as a way to talk shit after a big win against the Houston Texans. Because when life gives you hot piss, make memes.