Back in October 2021, Packers coach Matt LaFleur was asked about a Week 5 game in Cincinnati, which would be the team’s first of the season that took place at 1 p.m. ET—a noon start on his players’ body clocks.
His response was to utter, undoubtedly, one of the strangest coaching colloquialisms in existence; a phrase that, if amplified, may have rendered the typically modest Brown County, Wis., into the pearl-clutching position:
“[The team] has got to wake up with their piss hot,” LaFleur said.
When asked by a beat reporter to clarify how one gets their urine to such a temperature, LaFleur said: “It’s just a mentality … it should be naturally hot, right?”
In the coming months and years, I wondered why this never quite caught on; why industrious Packers fans didn’t show up to road games touting the heat of their piss, making T-shirts or hats. I imagined what it would be like to serve as a Packers beat reporter and ask LaFleur personally if he thought the team’s piss was indeed hot that afternoon in a 25–22 overtime win. It is just a very weird, but kind of cool thing to say, right? Personally, it ranks second, just behind the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard someone utter to another person in full view of the public: a septuagenarian telling an octogenarian at a banquet to “stay vertical, baby” (meaning: don’t die).
So, after becoming fed up with the silence, I went searching for answers on my own. Where did LaFleur first hear this? Who came up with the phrase “wake up with your piss hot”? And, also, do you really want your pee to be hot? Could I find what I was looking for before Green Bay’s first noon game of this season?
What I thought would be a series of simple answers led me down an internet rabbit hole. After confirming that LaFleur does really say this sometimes, I ran through roughly 20 phone calls, direct messages and emails, countless dead ends, an interview with an urologist and a wrong-number text to a very confused person in Arkansas.
As the Packers prepare to play the Falcons on Sunday, their first noon Central time game of the 2023 season, I have decided to report my findings, my frustrations and my conspiracy theory.
