In case you were out of the loop on the ongoing drama between NFL aggregators on Twitter and those in the national sports media seemingly calling them out—again—on Friday, we have you covered.
First, aggregator JPA Football accused aggregator Dov Kleiman of copying and pasting one of their tweets. Kleiman, a mysterious figure in the online sports world, has been criticized for not always sharing NFL stories with proper context or plagiarizing the info he shares.
That’s not the point here, though.
What JPA Football isn’t telling you here is that they directly lifted NFL media’s Gregg Rosenthal’s article of the top 50 free agents in 2024. And JPA Football, who otherwise would have a legitimate gripe about Kleiman stealing a tweet word-for-word, is complaining about credit when he essentially did the same thing to Rosenthal.
This caught the attention of ESPN’s Mina Kimes, who screenshotted the exchange and laughed at the ordeal.
“This is like a thief complaining about another robber stealing his loot,” she wrote.
Lmaoooo this is like a thief complaining about another robber stealing his loot pic.twitter.com/s4LMD3hw9C
— Mina Kimes (@minakimes) August 11, 2023
An underrated part of this whole situation, pointed out by Dallas Cowboys writer Brandon Loree, is that the “Dov” that JPA Football tagged is a spam account that is pretending to be the “real” Dov Kleiman. Clearly, we all have way too much time on our hands.
Kimes replied to her initial tweet with a link to Rosenthal’s article. You know, the one that JPA Football and Kleiman lifted directly from. That post was retweeted by NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport, one of Rosenthal’s colleagues. But don’t worry, Rosenthal made sure to spell Kyle Dugger’s name correctly in his article.
Here’s the actual list of upcoming free agents, which I know @greggrosenthal spends a ton of time working on, that both guys copied and tweeted out: https://t.co/cx75Fexaq7
— Mina Kimes (@minakimes) August 11, 2023
Rapoport made his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Friday and was asked why he decided to enter the fray here. McAfee and his crew said that the likes of Dov Kleiman and JPA Football, among several others, may all be the same person while referring to them as the “Israeli insiders” because they were all in Israel at the same time.
“What I was trying to do, Gregg Rosenthal is a good friend. He does a really good job on this free agent article, that I definitely read before retweeting,” Rapoport said. “I just liked how Mina Kimes called attention to the work that Gregg does, and so I wanted to retweet it because Gregg is a good colleague and I wanted everyone to see his list of however many free agents that was.”
https://twitter.com/PatMcAfeeShow/status/1690045221248397312
McAfee said that he likes these guys and has already given this motley crew a nickname of their own.
“This next generation here of ‘news accrue-ers’ I will say, because they accrue information and kind of just gather news and then they release it through their Twitter accounts,” he said. “It’s a new angle. It’s not an insider, it’s not a pundit, but kind of a little bit of punditry in the news. They’re not really bloggers, but kinda, because they’re giving their takes. And then sometimes not letting people know the context of the things that they’re saying and starting an absolute ****storm. But I appreciate that they’re hustling trying to make it out there.”
Rapoport was trying to be careful about his words, saying that those guys “sometimes” give credit.
“Every once in a while they give credit,” he said. “I don’t know the alternative. I don’t know why they exist, just being honest. But I don’t know the alternative.”
[Mina Kimes on Twitter, The Pat McAfee Show via Barrett Sports Media]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.