NFL teams were lost without X during free agency: ‘They have no idea where to find this stuff’

It’s not Aaron Rodgers, Sam Darnold or Tee Higgins who are dominating the NFL free agency conversation this year, it’s Elon Musk and Twitter.

Twitter, or X, to be politically correct in the current political climate, has suffered multiple outages Monday, and according to NFL Network insider Mike Garafolo, agents and teams literally didn’t know how to go about getting their news. Ian Rapoport and others can implore teams to just watch NFL Network all they want, but for the last decade-plus, everyone has spent the opening of free agency by scouring Twitter. And without it, they’re lost.

“Agents and teams are hitting us up like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ Because they follow this stuff just as much as we do. So when X goes down, they’re operating without a net here. They have no idea where to find all this stuff. That’s what we’re working on right now. Trying to figure out how to communicate to one another, kind of like we did 10 years ago,” Garafolo said Monday afternoon.

That makes sense for sports fans who have been habitually trained to repeatedly click refresh on Twitter during the open of NFL free agency. But you would think agents and teams have a way of keeping informed. Apparently not. Apparently, NFL front offices and agents are just like us.

Thankfully, there are other social media options like BlueSky or Threads. And while most of us have dabbled in those platforms since Musk turned Twitter into X, it’s Twitter or X that still reigns supreme. Part of that is because it’s what everyone is most comfortable with. Once that comfort is lost, more people will make the switch. Maybe that day is today, the start of NFL free agency, where X has failed the NFL, reporters, teams, agents, and sports fans.

The NFL has prohibited teams from operating BlueSky accounts in hopes of monetizing any sort of push to drive users away from X. But sometimes it takes chaos to spark change. And NFL free agency opening without the ability to break news on X was undoubtedly chaotic.