ESPN's "Sam Darnold: Out Indefinitely" Graphic

About

ESPN's "Sam Darnold: Out Indefinitely" Graphic refers to a clip from ESPN's broadcast of the Monday Night Football game between the Cleveland Browns and New York Jets in which ESPN brought up a screen showing Jets quarterback Sam Darnold looking intimidatingly at the camera while the words "Out Indefinitely: Mononucleosis" appeared behind him. Darnold had been diagnosed with mono earlier in the week and the date of his return is unknown. The graphic was mocked by sports fans, who felt it was emblematic of the general haplessness of the New York Jets franchise. It was also used as an exploitable template as people wrote different words behind Darnold's picture.

Origin

On September 16th, 2019, during a game between the New York Jets and Cleveland Browns, ESPN broadcast a graphic about Sam Darnold's recent diagnosis with mononucleosis and how he was out indefinitely while he healed. The graphic also featured Darnold looking intimidatingly at the camera (GIFs of the moment tweeted by @Bubbaprog shown below).

Spread

The moment was quickly mocked as an example of the New York Jets humorous struggles in history. Slate^[1] called the graphic "The Culmination of 60 Years of Jets Football," and compared it to the team's infamous "Butt Fumble," when quarterback Mark Sanchez ran into his own teammate's rear end, fumbled, and had the ball returned for a touchdown. Deadspin^[2] jokingly called it the Jets' only good moment in their 23-3 loss. Football fans began turning the graphic into an exploitable. Twitter user MattBerry05 tweeted the graphic with text from an episode of King of the Hill, gaining over 1,200 retweets and 7,200 likes (shown below, left). Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) created a generator^[3] that one could use to make humorous edits of the graphic (example shown below, right). These were covered by Deadspin.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References