Sometimes it’s the silliest things that go viral. This week it’s been NBC football analyst Cris Collinsworth and what is now known as the Collinsworth Slide.
If you’ve seen an NFL broadcast on NBC then you probably know it starts with Al Michaels giving an introduction about the game from the broadcast booth before welcoming in his broadcast partner Collinsworth. Somehow, Collinsworth’s entrance has become the talk of the internet and NBC even embraced the meme by tweeting out a collection of them from this season.
✨A tradition unlike any other✨
The @CollinsworthPFF Slide is iconic. pic.twitter.com/e4U2AqHAjd
— Sunday Night Football on NBC (@SNFonNBC) December 10, 2018
What made it even better, though, was this photoshopped video of Collinsworth’s entrance on a massive TV in a rowdy soccer bar. It’s been shared an amazing 25,000 times on Twitter. We can only hope that some bar around the country takes this as a challenge to do it for real this Sunday so we can see people actually celebrating the Collinsworth slide.
https://twitter.com/BigSeanQ/status/1071954527505518592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1071954527505518592&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fftw.usatoday.com%2F2018%2F12%2Fcris-collinsworth-slide-in-sunday-night-football-snf-nfl-memes-interview-videos
For what it’s worth, that viral tweet also led to what may be Darren Rovell’s greatest ever Twitter moment.
What about the man himself and his reaction? Tens of millions of people have watched Collinsworth every week in the fall for years now, but how is he responding now he’s internet famous? Collinsworth told For the Win that he’s having fun becoming a meme, even after being in the broadcast booth for multiple decades.
“It’s just fun,” he said. “My dad always said, ‘There’s no limit to the amount of people you can entertain as long as you’re willing to be the butt of the joke.’ And I’ve made a pretty good living off of that over the years.”
[…]
“If it’s funny and makes me laugh, I’m all good with it,” he said. “God forbid I do the ‘Electric Slide’ at a wedding or something. People would lose their minds.”
It’s kind of surreal how the simplest things can suddenly go viral, right? Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth have been doing pretty much the same Sunday Night Football intro for years and suddenly December 2018 is when the internet loses its minds over his patented slide? It is kind of cool, even if it is inexplicable and a little weird. It’s also awesome that Collinsworth is having fun with it, but just wait until the internet catches up with Tim Burke’s Buck-Aikman Family Portrait.
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