Dan Orlovsky Adam Schefter chest hair Screengrab via ESPN

Adam Schefter is the king of NFL insiderdom. And ESPN colleague Dan Orlovsky found out first-hand that he runs a tight ship in his world.

Orlovsky and Schefter have been teammates at ESPN for several years now covering different sides of the football world. But in an appearance with fellow Bristol friends Taylor Lewan and Will Compton at Bussin’ with the Boys, the former quarterback shared an incredible story about Schefter checking him over a tweet that could have been seen as a breaking news tease.

It happened when Dan Orlovsky first started at ESPN several years ago. He tweeted a message with eyeball emojis and immediately got a call from Adam Schefter who told him that a post like that was unacceptable. Extra bonus points for the podcast clip posted to the BWTB page that contains an AI version of Schefter sternly delivering the message to Orlovsky like something out of a modern-day NFL version of The Godfather.

“When I first started working at ESPN, so like 8 years ago, I sent out a tweet with like the emoji eyes, just that. I don’t remember for what. He called me within 30 seconds,” Orlovsky said. “He’s like, ‘what’s that?’ I’m like, ‘what do you mean?’ He’s like, ‘what’s your tweet about?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know I think I’m just being stupid or something like that.’ He was like, ‘don’t do that.'”

“He’s like, ‘don’t do that because if you do that it makes me think that something’s going on.’ I’m sorry I will not do that,” Orlovsky added.

Dan Orlovsky and Adam Schefter are clearly in a good place in their relationship, they’ve had plenty of fun and games on ESPN airwaves. However, an Awful Announcing investigation has shown that Orlovsky has continued to use the eyeball emojis in spite of Schefter’s clear warning – sometimes as a reply, sometimes as a quote tweet, and sometimes even as a solo message. In fact, he did it again just a few weeks ago!

It’s a great story because it shows just how intense and singularly focused Schefter must be to be instantly red flagged about a random eyeball tweet from one of his colleagues. The actual healthiness of that interaction is probably open to interpretation given how much we’ve learned about insider culture recently.

Our only hope is that Dan Orlovsky will continue to strategically use the eyeball emojis at random times as a diversionary tactic until he finally beats Adam Schefter at his own game and exclusively breaks Matthew Stafford’s retirement news.