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As NFL rookies prepare for the start of the season, they have lots to look forward to: money, fans and the opportunity to play a lifetime in the league. Life appears to be all glitz and glamour. So how do the vets loosen up the rooks and put them in their place? Pranks. After all, what better way to initiate a guy who's making twice as much money as you? We did some research to find some of the best (and PG-13-rated) jokes in the NFL. Welcome to the team, guys. … Happy hazing!

1. "With the GQ magazine thing, [my teammates] put a slide show of those pictures on every TV in the facility, and then they wrote like, 'David Hasselhoff?' We'd be installing plays on a PowerPoint presentation, and every once in a while, a PowerPoint would show up with one of the big pictures, and everyone's like, 'Ohhh!' And they'd dissect for like 10 minutes, and then we'd move on. It was pretty funny."
-- Mark Sanchez, New York Jets

2. "Every year, you always switch out guys' lotions and put in Icy Hot, and every year, it never gets old. We always get the rookies early in camp when they're not paying attention."
-- Steven Jackson, St. Louis Rams

3. "One of the defensive linemen told Quentin Groves he was going to the Pro Bowl for rookie of the year, and he believed it, so it was pretty funny. He called his family and everything. It was a funny joke. We ended up telling him after practice. You've got to humble them somehow."
-- Maurice Jones-Drew, Jacksonville Jaguars

4. "When I was in Green Bay, one of the rookie linemen was supposed to take Marco Rivera and Mark Tauscher out to eat or get them something to eat, and he didn't do it. So they took the rims and the tires off his car and had them sitting in his locker when he got in from practice. That was the best prank I'd ever seen."
-- Ahmad Carroll, New York Jets

5. "Singing; taped up to the goal post; dunked in an ice bath. They use about 20 guys, and if you're a rookie and you try to fight against it, it's not the smartest thing to do, because there's a lot of guys [who are] bigger and a lot of veterans. [It happened to] Leonard Pope."
-- Matt Leinart, Arizona Cardinals

6. "Me and Ryan Grant went to college together at Notre Dame, and one year in summer school, I hid some open tuna fish in one of his luggage racks, and he couldn't find it for the whole summer. At Notre Dame during the summer, they always put us in dorms with no air conditioning, so it was hot. That amplified the tuna smell. He was getting into fights with his teammates because he thought other people was messing up his room. He still doesn't know I did it, but I guess now he'll find out."
-- Justin Tuck, New York Giants

7. "Rich Seubert, our offensive lineman, he always puts this purple dye in the rookies' socks, gloves, pants. I don't know where he gets it from. I don't know what it is, but it stains real bad. And it's hard to get off. That's one prank they always do."
-- Sinorice Moss, New York Giants

8. "Ben-Gay in a shampoo bottle. Ben-Gay's like Icy Hot, and when you put it on, it burns instantly. It's like hot. It's basically like Vick's VapoRub. And a guy put it in a shower gel bottle, and he was like on fire."
-- Reggie Bush, New Orleans Saints

9. "When Jeb Terry was a rookie, Mike Alstott and Dave Moore took the hood off of his car and hid it behind one of the buildings, and he spent all day looking for it. He was talking smack to them. He tried to get them back, but you can't top that."
-- Derrick Brooks, Tampa Bay Bucs (recently released)

10. "When Joey LaRocque was a rookie, he was a pretty funny guy, but all of the linebackers tied him up and picked him up and threw him in the ice tub and told him he had to hold his breath for two minutes under the ice."
-- Darrell McClover, Chicago Bears

11. "A guy had his Hummer parked in the middle of the practice field. The whole moral of the joke was, 'You aren't above the team.' I guess he didn't come to practice because he felt like he didn't have to come. They said, 'If you're better than us, then you're going to park on the field.' It was Marcus McNeill. He's a very talented guy, a Pro Bowl guy. That was just really funny because when you went out to the practice field, you just see this big ol' Hummer on 26-inch rims and you're like, 'Who parked there?' Marcus McNeill."
-- Antonio Gates, San Diego Chargers

12. "Joe Juraszek, a strength coach, made a big model figure of Zach Thomas and put a dummy together with all the stuff Zach wore, some footballs, Zach's pads, Zach's helmet and all of Zach's stuff. He put a for-sale sign for $9.97. It was really funny."
-- DeMarcus Ware, Dallas Cowboys

13. "A lot of the rookies have to take the vets' cars and gas them up."
-- Darren McFadden, Oakland Raiders

14. "[In Detroit], we had a guy from Mexico who was playing for the national team, and we were trying to cut his hair because he had real long hair and we wanted to shave his head. So we were chasing him, and he took off, ran through a door, broke the door and knocked himself out silly. So the next day, when he came back, we had outlined the door in chalk where he had fallen through. It was the funniest thing."
-- Shaun Cody, Houston Texans

15. "Brett [Favre] killed a wild turkey and put it in one of our linebackers', Eric Barton's, locker. Everybody came in and was all freaked about it."
-- Darrelle Revis, New York Jets

16. "There's some sticky glue they've put in rookies' helmets and stuff like that. It gets bad."
-- Nnamdi Asomugha, Oakland Raiders

By Laura Lane
Nothing is off-limits in the world of NFL pranks - ESPN

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