On Saturday night Auburn and Ole Miss played another SEC classic with the Tigers winning on the road in Oxford 35-31. The game was decided on a play unlike one we’ve seen before. Star Mississippi receiver Laquon Treadwell was inches away from the go-ahead touchdown with 1:30 to play, but suffered a gruesome injury at the goalline and fumbled. Auburn recovered and went on to win the Top 5 showdown.
But this being 2014, someone had to make a stupid joke on Twitter about it. That someone was Geoff Ketchum of Orangebloods.com who thought it was juuuuust the right time to make a joke about segregation in the south…
https://twitter.com/NOaddiLA/status/528759768819982336
Even Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork got wind of the tweet…
Ketchum did apologize for the tweet in a series of messages trying to make amends…
On second glance? What about the first glance? How can someone possess that poor of judgment to state that publicly in the first place, let alone when a college athlete is lying on the field with a broken fibula and dislocated ankle. Furthermore, the joke doesn’t even make sense.
Ketchum, quite rightly, was immediately suspended by Rivals.com with a promise of a full editorial review. (Statement via AL.com)
“Rivals.com maintains strict editorial guidelines, and the Tweet by Geoff Ketchum violated not only our standards, but also the standards of our industry,” said Rivals.com PR manager Sean Hamel. “He has apologized and the Tweet has been removed. In addition, Geoff has been suspended from writing for Rivals.com and OrangeBloods.com and a full editorial review is underway.”
Ketchum wasn’t the only writer in hot water for a tweet surrounding the play. SI’s Pete Thamel got blasted by his followers for this tweet praising Auburn’s defenders on the play and making no mention of Treadwell. As you can see by the replies to Thamel’s tweet, it wasn’t taken to kindly…
For his part, Thamel told everyone to R-E-L-A-X. But he also deleted the tweet above…
https://twitter.com/SIPeteThamel/status/528739426944290816
What’s interesting about this episode is that Thamel has history with some ill-timed tweets regarding injured players. When Kevin Ware broke his leg in the 2013 NCAA Tournament and the bone was sticking out of his skin, Thamel created an uproar by taking the opportunity to tweet out a link to a 2011 column of his on questions of Ware’s recruitment.
You can get caught up in the phony debate about the Twitter Police and faux outrage and whatever, but those are all straw man arguments. When something like this happens, it’s about one thing – whether or not it is within the boundaries of decency and common sense to say it publicly to an audience of thousands or not. With Twitter those missteps happen far more frequently these days because there are no editors on Twitter. It’s unfiltered, raw, and in the moment. Many times that works for good. Other times, it produces unfortunate results that can’t be taken back.
In retrospect, Thamel’s tweet wasn’t that bad. Where’s the line on allowing praise for a player for making a great play even when someone unfortunately gets hurt? Perhaps with the sensitivity of the injury at the hand he could have at least waited until the game was over to share that thought. And if anything, Thamel’s past with Ware hurt him more than anything.
Ketchum’s message is one of the worst sports tweets in the history of the medium. Twitter has too many bad comedians as it is, it doesn’t need any more. And when you combine “awful injury” + “terrible timing” + “segregation humor” it’s a formula for disaster.
Ketchum goes down in the history books as just another sports personality that had to be disciplined for a momentary mental breakdown on Twitter. Is it really that hard for sportswriters to not get suspended or fired for something they tweet? Apparently so…
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