Reddit is a great online community filled with subreddits where you can discover more about your favorite things. For instance, the NFL subreddit is packed with everything a football fan could want in their internet browsing experience.
Subreddits are cool little microcosms of sports teams' fanbases, and those of the Detroit Lions and San Francisco 49ers are no different. With 108 thousand members and 153 thousand members, respectively, each Subreddit is filled with diehard fan content, hot takes, analysis, highlights, nostalgia and, most important for the sake of this article, memes. And ahead of the two teams' Week 1 matchup, their fan bases are using these memes as weaponry in an all-out war of trash talk and (often irreverent and NSFW) humor.
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What is a meme, you ask, older reader? It's a "humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users," according to Oxford Languages.
Some of the best examples from the different sides:
- The iconic "Circle of Life" scene from "The Lion King" with an absolutely hilarious and shocking twist
- A clip of the rap battle in Eminem's "8 Mile," where the lyrics are cleverly replaced to make fun of the 49ers for their lack of a definitive starting quarterback
- A meme showing "Mad Men" characters Don Draper and Pete Campbell as the two teams in question
- A graphic making fun of the 49ers for playing their home games closer to central San Jose than central San Francisco
- Quite the threatening graphic of WWE's The Undertaker, representing what the 49ers will do to Jared Goff in his Detroit debut
Nothing like some good old-fashioned trash talk between fan bases — even if doing so via memes on Reddit is hardly old-fashioned — ahead of the opening game of the season. But will this one be a particularly close contest? Perhaps not. FiveThirtyEight gives the 49ers a 66 percent chance to take this one and set the spread at 4.5 points. Vegas is even more confident in the 49ers, with consensus odds from a number of books putting the point spread at 8.0 in favor of San Francisco.
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