As NFL fans rush to Threads or BlueSky amid Twitter picking a brutal day for mass outages, Ian Rapoport reminds everyone television is your friend.
NFL free agency kicked off Monday at noon ET and no one knew where to find or report the breaking news. For the last decade-plus, fans have been habitually trained to repeatedly click refresh on Twitter to remain updated on all the latest NFL movings and signings. But on Monday, Elon Musk’s X, formerly and informally known as Twitter, suffered multiple outages, causing chaos in the NFL world. And as everyone wondered where to go for news, Rapoport remained the calm voice of reason.
“Man, if you thought we were important, wait until Twitter goes down. The only way to get this kind of information is right here on NFL Network…forget about Twitter. Just watch TV” – Ian Rapoport
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 11:59 AM
“Man, if you thought we were important, wait until Twitter goes down,” Rapoport said Monday morning on NFL Network. “The only way to get this kind of information is right here on NFL Network. Free Agency Frenzy. Forget about Twitter. Just watch TV, we’ll do all the news here, it’s totally fine.”
Unfortunately, TVs don’t fit in your pocket the way a phone does. But for those of us who sit at a desk most of the day, it was sound advice. And it was advice that even NFL teams and agents needed to hear, apparently. Rapoport’s colleague Mike Garafolo said he was hearing from teams and agents during the Twitter outage, wondering where they should go to keep up with the latest NFL news.
“When X goes down, they’re operating without a net here,” Garafolo said of NFL teams and agents. “They have no idea where to find all this stuff. That’s what we’re working on right now.”
It’s a shame Hard Knocks: Offseason was one and done. Because it would have been amazing to see an NFL front office panic over not knowing how to get information on the opening day of free agency because of an X outage.
Maybe an X outage is what Bluesky and Threads needed to become legitimate competition with Musk’s social media platform. But for those who are reluctant to go through the hassle of having to follow some insiders on Bluesky and others on Threads while still keeping tabs on X, television remains old faithful.
About Brandon Contes
Brandon Contes is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He previously helped carve the sports vertical for Mediaite and spent more than three years with Barrett Sports Media. Send tips/comments/complaints to bcontes@thecomeback.com