It’s always interesting to see what happens with unusual tweets. One, from ESPN’s @SportsCenter account, which has 40.7 million followers, got a lot of attention very quickly Thursday:
Just 10 minutes after that was first tweeted, it had more than 500 retweets and more than 3,000 likes. Those numbers continue to grow. And this led to some funny responses, including from the NFL, SB Nation (officially SportsBlogs Nation), Stadium, tennis’ US Open, and more:
The Washington Post followed suit on the news side:
And the Portland Pickles, an independent minor-league baseball team, had more of an editorial comment:
It’s unclear why @SportsCenter would simply tweet “sports,” but it feels similar to things like British politician Ed Balls (at that time, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer)’ 2011 tweet of his name:
Update: This also may have been a copy of Amtrak’s “trains” tweet, as eagle-eyed reader @MolotovTiel noted. That tweet went out 24 minutes ahead of ESPN’s:
ESPN’s social accounts have undergone quite the transformation over the past few years, especially following the January 2020 hire of Omar Raja from Bleacher Report/House of Highlights. Some of that change has been seen as negative by many. And that’s particularly true when it comes to those accounts tweeting out graphics of out-of-context quotes, an approach which has taken fire from athletes and media figures for improper attribution. That’s also sometimes even drawn criticism from their own personalities. But, fortunately, there isn’t a particular need to attribute “sports.” And this is far from the worst thing that you can tweet.
It’s also been interesting to see how far the @SportsCenter account has gone afield from things that might actually appear on the show SportsCenter. It’s become much more of a general-purpose “sports” account, often not that distinguishable from @espn. And while it’s unclear what the intention was with them just tweeting “sports,” it certainly brought @SportsCenter a lot of attention. No word yet on if this was intentional, or if it’s something they might have changed if they had edit button access. At any rate, a pivot to tweeting just “sports” can be well described by fake ESPN8 The Ocho commentator Pepper Brooks:
[SportsCenter on Twitter]