Georgetown coach Ed Cooley responds to X posts on him heading to Virginia. Georgetown coach Ed Cooley responds to X posts on him heading to Virginia. (X.)
College BasketballFoxTwitterBy Andrew Bucholtz on

Coaches and athletes have always had to answer some unusual questions. But a notable trend lately has been them addressing reports seemingly fabricated for engagement.

The latest apparent case of that came from Georgetown men’s basketball head coach Ed Cooley, who went on quite the rant in an interview with Fox at the Big East’s media day Wednesday in response to a question about his supposed interest in the newly-open Virginia job, even referencing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

The question there is “The rumor that spread pretty quickly yesterday about you going to Virginia. No truth?” Cooley’s response is “Zero truth to that. And when you have many people who hide behind all these social media platforms…I’m where I need to be, I’m where I want to be.

“I will tell you this, this will be my last college job I have. My goal is to make Georgetown basketball powerful again, and inspire other people. That’s all false news. And it’s unfortunate that people jeopardize livelihoods, jeopardize people. It’s unfortunate. But Martin Luther King’s dream will protect them too. They can dream somewhere else. But don’t dream on my dream. I’m living that dream.”

Okay, so, aside from the MLK reference, that could be a pretty typical coach shoot-back at reports of them leaving for another job, right? We’ve seen that before with people like Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin (specifically at local CBS reporter Jon Sokoloff over a potential move to Auburn), but Kiffin also dodged questions on his move from FAU to Ole Miss before eventually announcing it.

And some coaches have put out incredible denials of a move before making it. Those have included former football coach turned U.S. senator Tommy Tuberville’s “They’d have to carry me out of here in a pine box” line before leaving Ole Miss for Auburn in 1998, and Texas A&M baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle calling a reporter “selfish” this summer for asking him about a move to Texas and saying he took the A&M job “to never take another job again, and that hasn’t changed in my mind.” (He promptly then left for Texas a day later.) So under normal circumstances, this would come down as an emphatic denial from Cooley, but not a “there’s no way this will happen.”

But the specifics in Cooley’s situation are much stranger. That “rumor” doesn’t appear to have originated from any actual reporter. Instead, one of the earliest sources for it (who had it as Virginia actually hiring Cooley) is long-time noted reporter-impersonating account “Simon Charles,” or @SCharles_NFL:

As Barstool Sports writer Reags noted, the Charles account has been provably false for a long time. And it’s been specifically noted for Big East shenanigans, including around the bio of ” “Esteemed sports journalist & Patriots Beat Writer PHD in journalism from PCBCU.” (PCBC is the “Providence College Burner Community.”) But it’s not the only account that weighed in on this. Another, seemingly more reasonable one that was less clear the deal was done, came from the @RealRobReinhart X account. Here’s what was posted there:

But the Reinhart account carries its own questions. The bio of “Covering all-things sports for the Herald since 2024. Previously @SInow and @bleacherreport. Auburn alum. All opinions are my own.”  is more reasonable than Charles’ But the linked “Herald” is a site using the old New York Herald (the 1835-1924 newspaper, which then went on through 1966 as the New York Herald-Tribune following a merger) name and header.

At first glance, it could conceivably be an actual news site, with apparent stories in everything from “U.S.” to “World” to “Sports,” and with many of the sports ones under Reinhart’s byline. But there’s no about or contact information on that site beyond a form, and the actual stories (which, in sports, have the most recent of “Yankees at the All-Star break: A disasterclass,” bylined by Reinhart) require a $25 a month subscription to read, so what’s actually there is unclear without that payment.

And Reinhart doesn’t appear to have a LinkedIn profile (he is not the host of a Detroit public radio music show). He also doesn’t seem to have an archive at either Bleacher Report or Sports Illustrated, the sites that X bio cites. And his X account has gotten into controversy before. That includes a June report the Toronto Maple Leafs were “on the verge” of trading Mitch Marner (they didn’t), as well as a more recent claim the NCAA was moving away from Ken Pomeroy’s stats that got community noted:

On the Big East front, too, there were some very dubious claims there about commissioner Val Ackerman and St. John’s coach Rick Pitino:

So that account doesn’t seem much more reputable than “Charles.” And no proven college basketball reporter seems to have linked Cooley and Virginia. And yet, rumors that seem mostly to stem from the Reinhart and Charles accounts got major traction, including a response to Reinhart and another fan from Fox announcer Tim Brando Tuesday:

Jeff Goodman of The Field of 68 then responded “Fake account, Tim” to Brando, and Brando noted that:

But this still led to Fox Sports asking Cooley about this at Big East media day, and then relaying his answer with “FOX SPORTS EXCLUSIVE.” And that led to a lot of people criticizing Fox for amplifying this seemingly-fake rumor. Here’s some of that:

The last post there gets at one of the roots of this problem. That would be X’s abandonment of verification in favor of a “premium” check anyone could pay for, and then a monetization policy that rewards those who pay for those checkmarks for the engagement they receive.

Fake reporter accounts have been around for a long time on X predecessor Twitter. A few of the many examples there include the 2019 (and beyond) fake quotes from “College Football Quotes,” the 2019 claim from “Richard G. West” that Colgate’s Jordan Burns missed a flight and took an Uber between cities for a NCAA Tournament game (which fooled local CBS sites and even Burns’ mother), West’s 2022 fake tweets on College GameDay that drew an ESPN PR response, and Twitter’s own amplification of “RobBuchananFox” fake quotes from Kevin Garnett in 2022. And more-obviously-branded satirical things like “Ballsack Sports” (the creator of which spoke to AA’s Sean Keeley back in 2022) existed back then as well and fooled many, including Outkick/Fox News and ESPN (on numerous occasions).

But the July 2023-implemented monetization change (which was previously announced that February, not long after Elon Musk finalized his acquisition of the then-Twitter platform in October 2022, and then rolled out around a lot of other promised-but-not-implemented changes, including reading limits for free users) has made a dramatic difference. A.J. Perez explored some of that in a Front Office Sports story focusing on NBA Central parody account “NBA Centel” this week, with that story illustrating the benefits of fake quotes and fake reporting under this engagement-rewarding system. And this is the latest example of that, and Fox (unwittingly or not) rewarded these fake accounts by elevating their tweets to a level of an interview question to Cooley and an “exclusive” response from him.

Beyond the wider trend, there are specifically unusual Big East, Georgetown, and Providence factors at play in this one, though. Ahead of the 2023-24 season, Cooley left Providence (where he had coached since 2011) to take the job at fellow Big East school Georgetown. And that led to a very strange situation in December and January, when a “Big East Films” account popped up on YouTube and started with a fan-led Divine Providence documentary on the Friars, featuring one panelist who spent his time “likening former Friars head coach Ed Cooley to Adolf Hitler and claiming that the now-Georgetown coach had been involved in extramarital affairs during his time at Providence.”

That even led to journalist Goodman (seen above responding to Brando on this and criticizing Fox for covering it) claiming the documentary creator misled participants. It also led to Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy pumping up the film as “the doc that Ed Cooley and Jeff Goodman don’t want you to watch apparently.” So anything involving Providence, the “PCBC,” Cooley, and Goodman comes with a whole whopping heap of context. And Fox doesn’t appear to have caught much of that ahead of this question to Cooley and the publicization of his response, which elevated this story well beyond a corner of X and got the accounts involved paid a lot more in the process.

[Fox College Basketball on X]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz