The Green Bay Packers were blown out 30-17 by the Detroit Lions on Monday Night Football, and the final score would’ve been 30-10 if not for a meaningless — well, not to everyone — touchdown on an untimed down to end the game.
The Packers were without Aaron Rodgers for a second straight game, and needed their defense to play very well to win a Brett Hundley-quarterbacked game. That definitely didn’t happen. Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford torched the Green Bay secondary, completing 26-of-33 passese for 361 yards and two touchdowns.
After the game Packers cornerback Damarious Randall was very honest about the defense’s performance, telling the media, “We just shitted the bed. Point blank. Period.”
#Packers CB Damarious Randall on the defense: “We just shitted the bed. Point blank. Period.”
— Michael Cohen (@Michael_Cohen13) November 7, 2017
You don’t see or hear “shitted” said very much. Then again, you don’t hear “shat” all that frequently either, even though that would seem to be the correct usage of shit in the past tense. But, you do hear how a team or player “shit the bed” as meant in the past tense.
Grammarist actually has a debate on this!
Shat vs. shitted
Shat is the widely accepted past-tense inflection of shit. It was formed by analogy with the verb sit, which becomes sat in the past tense. It was originally a humorous and slightly sanitized version of the curse word, but it has become the standard form.
There are two alternatives: (1) shitted, which appears about once for every instance of shat; and (2) shit, uninflected in the past tense. The second option likens the word to verbs like fit and knit, which are usually uninflected in most varieties of English.
No usage guides that we know of cover this word, so it’s best to go along with conventional, real-world usage. Right now, the conventional usage favors shat.
So, it’s shat. Probably. Whatever the case, we can all agree that the Packers’ defense was quite shitty, and will need to improve their play significantly to hang in the NFC North race without Rodgers.
