Georgia football's final tweet from the game against South Carolina.
NCAATwitterBy Andrew Bucholtz on

We’ve seen some team Twitter accounts take the approach of just stopping tweeting rather than acknowledging a loss recently, particularly Tennessee’s football account in a Sept. 1 loss to Georgia State. The latest to follow suit is the Georgia Bulldogs’ official Twitter account, which shut down late in regulation in the No. 3 Bulldogs’ double-overtime loss against the South Carolina Gamecocks Saturday. Here’s their final tweet, which came from 3:06 p.m. Eastern when they tied the game:

Two-plus hours after that, the Bulldogs still hadn’t sent another tweet. But lots happened in the game, including the Gamecocks recording their third interception of Georgia quarterback Jake Fromm on the day in the first overtime (but missing the subsequent field goal), South Carolina making a field goal in the second overtime, and Bulldogs’ kicker Rodrigo Blankenship missing his own field goal to give the Gamecocks the win. You wouldn’t know any of that if you were only looking at the Georgia Twitter account, though.

The logic behind not tweeting the final results may be that any final tweet would be overwhelmed with trolling replies from fans of other teams, and that makes some sense. However, going dark creates its own issues; it means there’s no official acknowledgement of the loss on that account, no promotion for the athletic department’s own recap of the game, and no post-game comments from the head coach or the players. And the last previous tweet then winds up with some of the replies from other fans, so this strategy doesn’t exactly avoid all of those. A few selected replies:

Also, plenty of people notice when you don’t tweet, and that leads to lots of attention being paid to when you finally do break the Twitter silence. We’ll see when Georgia does that and what tweet they use to do so. But for now, it’s all quiet on the Twitter front.

UPDATE: They’re back, a minor 28 hours later:

Also, yeah, no kidding:

https://twitter.com/amandamull/status/1183521294651940866

[Georgia Football on Twitter]

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