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?”
Kassidy Hill/USA TODAY Network
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 actual 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.
“So, the normal temperature of urine is between 90 and 100 degrees in a healthy human,” says urologist Ravi Munver. He is the vice chair and chief of minimally invasive/robotic urologic surgery, and professor of urology at Hackensack University Medical Center.
On this weekday afternoon in August, the two of us were locked in a conversation that, no doubt, made us think the same thing: I can’t believe I went to college for this.
I phoned Munver, a Jets fan who switched to being a Giants fan in college, to get to the core of a simple question: Do you even want your piss hot? As it turns out, LaFleur’s science is impeccable here. In a very basic sense, LaFleur could be saying that he wants his players to wake up under the optimal biological conditions for living. Relatively hot piss is good.
“So, if a person’s urine is below that temperature, they could be septic,” Munver says of the potentially life-threatening condition. “They could have been outside and suffering from hypothermia. Those are reasons that temperatures could be lower.”
I reminded Munver that LaFleur said hot, though. What would happen if it was warmer than 100 degrees? Munver explained that urine temperature rises pretty much in accordance with core temperature. So, the harder your body is working, the hotter your piss.
The lone exceptions would be “if you have a fever, or if you are having massive infections throughout your body, through your abdomen, those could also increase your temperature.” Presumably, Packers team doctors check for that kind of stuff.
Oddly enough, freezing temperatures can lower your urine temperature, and LaFleur’s team plays in the coldest stadium in the NFL, with an average game-day temperature in the high 30s at Lambeau Field. Would those temperatures negate the heat of someone’s piss despite someone working hard on the football field and theoretically raising their body temperatures? Was I overthinking this?
“I just think this phrase means that you want to be really fired up,” Munver says, amazingly still willing to be on the phone with me. “Have energy. Be working out, sweating. You want your body temperature to be up.”
More definitively, he said, LaFleur’s observation “has validity.”
Beth Hall/USA TODAY Sports
If you search “Get Your Piss Hot” (with Google safety barriers ON), LaFleur is not the first football coach who comes up.
The phrase was actually popularized in 2012 by then Arkansas head football coach John L. Smith. For those who may not remember, Smith was a college football coach from 1971 to 2018. His most prominent job was leading Michigan State from ’03 to ’06. He once told a sideline reporter during a halftime interview that “the kids are playing their tails off, and the coaches are screwing it up.” He once slapped himself in the face on the podium. His loss to Notre Dame in ’06 berthed one of the most famous radio rants of all time.
He was also known as a force of genuine humility and positivity. People who worked with Smith say they loved him. And, he was a successful coach. He won 157 games over the course of his career to 137 losses, won two Big Sky conference championships at Idaho, two Big West conference championships at Utah State and two Conference USA championships at Louisville.
Smith was surprised that his players had leaked (pun intended) his favorite phrase. During the 2012 SEC media day, Razorbacks linebacker Tenarius Wright told reporters that: “‘Get your piss hot’ is something that John L. Smith says to get you ready to play. It’s something he uses to motivate us and keep us fired up.”
When Smith was asked to corroborate Wright’s statement, he said: “Who told you about that? That was supposed to be a secret. ‘Get your piss hot’ means that it’s time to start revving it up. It’s time to start getting after it. It’s time to get that motor ready and get that emotion going.”
Knile Davis, the Razorbacks’ star running back at the time, told reporters that players wore “Get Your Piss Hot” T-shirts. A Google image search does not turn up evidence of this; however, an Arkansas-themed merchandise company called “Hog Hats” sells both hats and shirts with the phrase “Get Your Piss Hot” on them to this day (you can get it in five-panel red or standard white for $33). The company did not return a last-minute email asking for comment in the 24 hours before publishing this story.
Smith, in the beautiful and nascent days of Twitter (the platform now known as X), even had a hot-piss-themed hashtag. After an August practice in 2012, he posted: “Exciting first day of practice! I can see some steam rising #GYPH.”
What felt like a breakthrough, though, ended up being where the stream of information slowed to a trickle (haha). Wright, who is now the director of strength and conditioning for the University of Illinois, did not respond to a direct message on social media. Davis also did not respond to a request to talk about getting his piss hot, or to talk to me about whether he still had a Get Your Piss Hot T-shirt.
It was time to go straight to the man himself, to see whether he could explain the origins of hot piss and why we talk about it, and maybe shed a little light on how the saying made it all the way to Wisconsin.
There was only one problem: Where the hell was John L. Smith?
In searching for a working phone number for Smith, I reached out to folks at Arkansas, Michigan State, Fort Lewis and Kentucky State, all places Smith had worked. None of them had any forwarding addresses, phone numbers nor information for Smith.
I emailed and direct-messaged coworkers, and called in favors with several national college football reporters, but the trail was cold. Colder than septic piss.
I was forwarded one number for Smith that turned blue in the iPhone message window—a sign of almost guaranteed success—and wrote: “Hey John, this is Conor Orr and I’m a football writer from Sports Illustrated. A phrase you used often at Arkansas has become very popular in the NFL. I wanted to reach out to learn where you got it from. I hope all is well!”
A minute later, the response was: “Wrong number!”
A message left with the University of Idaho’s alumni relations office (Smith coached there from 1989 to ’94 and is in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame after going 53–21 over the course of six seasons), yielded no help. The university could only confirm that Smith used to work there but “was not at liberty to disclose his contact information.”
I began to wonder whether Smith was the right angle to pursue at all, given that I had no way to tie him to LaFleur.
That’s when I had a breakthrough. In searching Wikipedia entries and media guides for some of Smith’s former staffers to contact, I rediscovered that Jets coach Robert Saleh worked for Smith as a graduate assistant at Michigan State. Immediately after leaving the Spartans in 2003, he latched on to Brian Kelly and Central Michigan in ’04. Also on that staff? LaFleur.
The two of them started working together in the NFL not long afterward. Saleh arrived in Houston with the Texans in 2005. LaFleur got there in ’08 after a stint with the Ashland Eagles as their offensive coordinator.
Their nickname as young assistants? The “Piss Boys.”
“‘Piss Boys’ means you weren’t allowed to say no. Clean out the air ducts for the tight end coach’s first house? You go clean them out. Copier breaks? You gotta fix it,” Saleh told The Athletic. “There was no, ‘Well, I don’t have time.’ You … you just get pissed on. … And at the end of the day, you smile and you go take your shower, and then you go get ready to go get pissed on again. And that’s just the life of a quality-control [coach].”
A tweet from the writer Jason Hirschhorn on July 10, 2023, tying together LaFleur’s “piss hot” press conference with the fact that he was once a “piss boy” in Houston with Saleh reached more than one million people on Twitter. What it did not provide in the underlying comments were concrete answers.
Shortly after the discovery, the search went completely dead. Such is the roller-coaster of investigative journalism. A Packers spokesperson, who miraculously did not just delete my email and block my address, and in a moment I would have paid to witness, asked LaFleur whether the quote had originated with Saleh.
Sadly, it had not. Any thought of asking the Jets and Saleh for a second corroboration, this week in particular, felt borderline cruel.
During his first press conference of the week Wednesday, LaFleur was asked around the 10-minute mark about the noon start time. If pissing hot still meant something to him two years after changing the way we talk to one another, this would have been the time and the place for him to bring it up.
I’m not the only one who wanted to believe this could become synonymous with Green Bay culture, by the way. Just a month ago, Reddit user Nachie posted:
“It’s not going to get old. It’s never not going to be hilarious.
Informally I think we’re all already on the train; I know I instinctively upvote every hot piss joke I come across.
But I’m telling you right now: I’m slicing my hand open on a cheese grater to make a blood oath that I will never let “hot piss” die.
I want the next several coaches after MLF retires to all have to deal with nonsensical comments about boiling piss from the fanbase. I want the franchise to eventually capitulate and start making official merch about it. I want tongue-in-cheek warning signs in all the restrooms at Lambeau.
I’m dead serious about this. Hot piss is a solid cornerstone we can lay right at the foundation of the Green Bay Packers franchise for now and all time.”
The post yielded 123 comments and 257 upvotes. Despite one user’s wondering whether talking about piss in the official Packers Reddit forum would be “off putting” to newcomers (an amazing display of Midwestern nice) there seemed to be some firm support.
“You have my piss,” wrote user DustyBookBoy.
“My piss is hot just reading this post,” wrote user Knibbler0.
“We need hot piss merchandise,” wrote user NrM-tuga.
LaFleur, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be committed to the bit.
“These guys, they’re professionals,” LaFleur said when asked about the noon start time. “Certainly, I think it was good we experienced a noon game in the preseason in terms of how you have to get up and how you have to go early in the morning. How you fuel. Eating breakfast, all that stuff. It’s an important part of it.
“I think every week is a challenge, no matter what time you’re playing or how you’re playing. But I think having most of those guys go through it was an important part.”
Even though LaFleur did talk about “how you have to go early in the morning,” he was not referring to one of his greatest hits. Not even close.
In their far-more-generous-than-needed response, the Packers noted that LaFleur thought he may have heard it at some point during his years as a college coach, but ultimately wasn’t sure. Smith, despite several attempts at reaching him through various sources, remains in the proverbial wind. And while our brain tends to crave the tidy endings fed to us through our streaming sources of choice, a little ambiguity can be healthy sometimes.
Time has a way of providing us answers when we’re ready. LaFleur coached at Saginaw Valley State, Central Michigan, Northern Michigan and Ashland as a college coach, which gives us dozens more names to try. Dozens of ropes to piss up. But there will be no pissing and moaning in the meantime, nor any pissing away time on bad leads.
Until that day the answer presents itself to us, our piss will be hot.
