It was supposed to be lighthearted. It was supposed to be fun. A simple bet between coworkers to spice up our weekly NFL prognostication. Now, with the finish line of the regular season in sight, everything has gone off the rails.
Our dumb NFL picks bet has ruined the life of our coworker
We feel bad for our coworker, but this is tremendous content.
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
In case you haven’t been reading this season, each week a group of us submit our straight moneyline picks for the NFL. We’ve been doing this kind of post for years without any incident. This year we decided to spice it up by having some week-to-week stakes. The winner of the week, i.e. the person with the highest W/L record would get to write a tweet for the loser of the week (worst W/L), which they would then need to post from their account without an explanation beforehand.
For most of the season this has gone off without a hitch. We’ve gotten a few snide comments and some misplaced anger, but that’s about it. That was, until David Fucillo won this week and RJ Ochoa from Blogging the Boys and the SB Nation NFL show finished in last place.
Immediately we knew how cold blooded this was. Fooch is a 49ers fan, RJ covers the Cowboys — so it’s all on brand, but still we had an inkling this was going to be bad. Sure, we cracked some jokes about Micah Parsons tweeting back at him in anger, but nothing could have prepared us for what happened when RJ sent this out to his 55,000 followers.
Anarchy descended on the tweet immediately. RJ replied to his own tweet with a comment by Fooch, explaining the gag — but it was impossible to put Pandora back in the box. Literally hundreds of angry Cowboys wants were up in the replies screaming at RJ about this obvious nonsense. To their credit, a good chunk of people read beyond the first tweet and understood the gag — but many, many more did not. These are some of the more tame replies.
Suddenly RJ, who is a delightful man and excellent NFL analyst was getting dragged everywhere. A Facebook account with over 100,000 followers aggregated his bet tweet and posted it without context, which only fanned the flames more.
If you thought it all ended here, hoo boy did this take a turn. We were all laughing about how badly this went and commiserating with RJ’s pain when we noticed a really curious tweet from the Sunday Night Football account.
Okay sure, there’s a good chance this could just be happenstance — but it’s awfully coincidental that there was another Parsons vs. Bosa argument happening right after RJ spent the whole morning getting dragged for his bet tweet. At the very least it reignited the conversation on his Twitter, and let to more people chiming in on what an idiot RJ is.
I really need to defend my coworker here. This was a horrible bet gone atrociously wrong. Just so we’re 100 percent, absolutely clear with no chance of misunderstanding:
RJ OCHOA DOES NOT BELIEVE THE DALLAS COWBOYS SHOULD TRADE MICAH PARSONS FOR ANYONE. LET ALONE SENDING PARSONS AND A FIRST ROUND PICK TO THE 49ERS OR NICK BOSA!
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