In the past week, Ukraine hit Russia with some kind of bombing attack, and it destroyed data centers that were apparently serving as some kind of bot farms. If there’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s that Russian bots are real, and they’re programmed to sow discord in the most vulnerable areas of society. There’s a whole political side of that (I don’t do politics), but there’s most definitely a sports side of that.
On that sports side, those bots are definitely rooted deep in NFL Twitter. They could either be there purely to disrupt the reasonable status quo, or they could be there to learn about our culture as a football community. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know.
My point is: if those data centers have gone down, that means the rats trying to stir up drama that makes everyone’s life terrible are gone, right? Yes, kind of. Maybe. Well, not completely. There are real people out there who have the same opinions, but a whole bunch of the bots are gone, and with that, we’ve seen some changes in online discourse.
Is any of this really because some villain headquarters got all blown up, or is it for some other reason? Your guess is as good as mine because we’re all equally dumb.
I’m not making any claims. All I’m doing is simply asking questions … That’s all. And these are some semi-reasonable, and possibly dumb, questions that have to be asked now that the propaganda machines have taken a hit.
What happened to the Tyreek Hill talk?
A couple of weeks ago, Tyquan Thornton went down with a gnarled-up ankle after he caught a mondo-sized pass from Patrick Mahomes in the fourth quarter against the Raiders. Kansas City has already needed help at the wide receiver position since the end of last season. With Thornton going out, it meant that they were also missing their field-stretching deep guy.
One of the bigger free-agent wide receivers out there is Tyreek Hill. There’s obviously a big connection between him and the Chiefs, so he was naturally being talked about as a guy that they would re-sign during their Week 5 bye … Despite him dislocating his knee last year, saying that he has “no power” in his leg three months ago and him being an all-around bad guy and psychopath.
In other words, that’s the perfect type of player for a Russian Bot Farm to create a controversial conversation about. To be fair, that wasn’t hard to do … so they did.
There were a whole bunch of Twitter threads about how long it would take for him to get to the Chiefs and what that team would look like with him. Then, it just kind of stopped completely.
Is that because he’s in court right now? Or is that because the bot accounts that want a real-life villain back in the lives of the American public have been destroyed?
Why can’t the Eagles call plays?
The Eagles are one fanbase that doesn’t need international interference for there to be wild takes and propaganda thrown around. This is less about that than the other questions that I’ve been asking, and more about the actual mechanisms functioning in Nick Sirianni’s brain.
This offseason, Sirianni talked about how he discovered ChatGPT and how he used it to find motivational stories to keep his messaging to the team fresh. It was a dumb thing to say out loud, but to be fair, Sirianni isn’t exactly the smartest dude in the world.
There’s a non-zero chance that Sirianni just calls all AI platforms ChatGPT, and we know that he tries to get any kind of competitive advantage possible. That means there’s a non-zero chance that he used some kind of bootleg Russian-backed platform.
If that’s the case, would you be surprised if he asked this extranational entity for ideas on how to game plan? Would you be surprised if said entity realized that the head coach of a team with the most aggressive fanbase in American sports was asking for help? Would you be surprised if said entity gave Sirianni bad advice?
Then, the data centers go kaput, Sirianni doesn’t have a Grima Wormtongue in his ear, and the Eagles offense has a chance to do something … Unfortunately, all of the offensive playmakers are hurt, so things never ended up looking any better.
Where did the Deshaun Watson defenders go?
One of the most polarizing people in the NFL is Deshaun Watson; his past is sordid, at its very best.
Two weeks ago, something really bizarre happened: the Amazon broadcast on Thursday Night Football decided to try to make Deshaun Watson a redemption story. They did a whole puff piece on him before the game, talking about all the things that he had to overcome.
Nick Chubb coming back from a brutal leg injury deserves a piece like that. Brandon Graham coming back from a torn Achilles deserves that. Hell, Kyler Murray and Jared Goff deserve that.
A guy who was credibly accused of over 20 different (yet horrifyingly similar) accounts of sexual crimes maaaaaaaybe shouldn’t get that same grace, right?
So after that game ended, the sentiment coming from a big part of the internet was, ‘Hey. What the hell? That guy sucks as a person.’ The general response from the weirdos was, ‘Who cares? He’s a ball player. Three-game winning streak. Why can’t we focus on what he does on the field?’
Those are all things that people without conscience, morals, regret, or shame say. In other words: bots.
Last Sunday, Watson got sacked a whopping eight times. The ‘Let’s focus on the football’ accounts were awfully quiet about that … And it was probably because they exploded.
Who thought a Super Team would work?
The Rams built one hell of a roster over the offseason. That’s undeniable. On paper (numbers-wise), they were the best team in the NFL by a whooooole lot. We all know that the NFL not only makes it impossible for Super Teams to exist, but we also know that anything close to Super Teams ends up failing. Every. Single. Time.
That didn’t stop the Super Team talk from happening. No real human being would ignore the history of every super awesome roster that has been built … But a clanker sure would, and a clanker would absolutely latch onto a team that is prolifically awesome numbers-wise.
Then actually football gets played, the Rams are semi-bad, a bunch of bombs get dropped on a bunch of computers … and now we’re not hearing anything? Okay bud.
I’m supposed to believe that the online discourse around the Rams naturally went from ‘Sheesh, they’re world beaters' to ‘lol, fat kicker got fired’ and it doesn’t have anything to do with propaganda machines getting destroyed? Yeah right.
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