One of the pleasures of social media is that it lets athletes, celebrities, whomever else deny reports about themselves in real time.

On Thursday, we saw the routine play out perfectly according to script. Here’s how it works.

1. Highly respected reporter reports something about someone.

In this case, we have NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport telling the world that Broncos running back Cj Anderson is out for the year due to a knee injury.

2. Subject of report offers firm denial

 

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This “false” tweet was followed up by a few more from Anderson, in which he expressed that, “The false report that people have is crazy we would know later today what’s going on so please don’t believe these false allegations.”

We would embed this series of tweets, but we can’t because:

3. Subject of report deletes tweets denying report

Apparently Anderson is having second thoughts about such a categorical denial.

4. Someone, usually the reporter, is proven right

This part hasn’t happened yet, but we’ll keep our eye out. Rapoport would not just make something up, so the most likely scenarios are that either 1) the report is true and Anderson is lying for one reason or another or 2) there’s some uncertainty about Anderson’s knee and the gray area got lost in a game of telephone between the Broncos’ doctors, the running back, someone “close to him” and Rapoport.

Raporport has not tweeted further about Anderson’s injury, neither confirming his report nor hedging on it.

Adam Schefter, awfully credible himself, reported earlier in the day that Anderson did not have an ACL tear and would learn more about his status later in the day.

We’ll monitor the situation and see whether Rapoport’s original report winds up being true.

UPDATE: Rapoport doubles down, Anderson is silent:

About Alex Putterman

Alex is a writer and editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. He has written for The Atlantic, VICE Sports, MLB.com, SI.com and more. He is a proud alum of Northwestern University and The Daily Northwestern. You can find him on Twitter @AlexPutterman.

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