This week's bad aggregation included stories on Mark Davis, Shedeur Sanders, and more. This week’s bad aggregation included stories on Mark Davis, Shedeur Sanders, and more.
College FootballNFLNHLOriginalsTwitterWNBABy Andrew Bucholtz on

We’re back again to examine more bad aggregation. This week’s column will cover aggregation missteps (poor/no sourcing, misrepresentation, and more) from Sept. 13-19 (with one exception, detailed below).

5. “Dov Kleiman” doesn’t update corrected Jay Glazer report

An often-seen problem with aggregation is when the source story changes, the source notes that, and the various aggregators don’t. A case in point this week came from the relatively correct aggregation of an on-TV report from Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer, who later took to X/Twitter to say he misspoke. Here’s how the “Dov Kleiman” account handled it.

Here’s what Glazer said later:

The cut-off portion of that tweet below that is “for 2024-26. MY bad.” And that’s a fair apology from Glazer and a notable change to the story; that means that the Browns didn’t actually remove this clause at all, just that it wasn’t included in the revised one (but hadn’t been included in the original one beyond 2022-23 so that’s no change). But many of the people who reported this, including “Kleiman,” don’t appear to have offered any update. And that’s less than ideal for what would have been a significant story if the initial report was right.

(This is more difficult to verify thanks to “Kleiman” blocking me, however, so if there is evidence that the account offered a correction, let us know, and we’ll update. Also, it’s worth making a general note here for this column; the “Kleiman” account likely wasn’t the only one to aggregate this and not update later, but it’s the one we saw. And we’re not able to include every aggregation error on every story, so there will undoubtedly be some accounts doing similar things without being noted here, but we try to be as fair as possible with it.)

Rating: **

4. X/Twitter’s Grok AI claims WNBA expansion was official before it was:

A big challenge in reporting, in general, is breaking news stories and identifying the specific part of the process a story is at. Unsurprisingly, aggregation often does this poorly (it is often the game of telephone shown in our top graphic here). And it’s even less surprising that AI-powered aggregation often really struggles with this, given technology’s challenges with context.

X/Twitter’s “Grok” AI has done this many times.

Their latest case was prematurely reporting “WNBA to expand with Portland team” at a point Tuesday, citing a top tweet from the league hinting at the expansion but not yet announcing it:

A screenshot of X/Twitter’s Grok AI claiming the WNBA had announced expansion when they only teased it. (Brendon Kleen.)

This is far from the worst mistake from Grok, especially as the league did officially announce this expansion Wednesday. So this was premature, but eventually right. And the expansion there had been reported for a long while, particularly by Sean Highkin of the Rose Garden Report back on Aug. 31; that reporting, and other reporting backing it, was also in the discussion here that Grok referenced. And if the summary here had added “reportedly,” there wouldn’t be an issue with it. But it didn’t, and it indicated the official announcement was further along than it was. And process matters even when the eventual outcome is correct.

Rating: **

3. “Roberto Luongo responded to a ‘goalie needed’ ad on Facebook”

This is our date exception, as the actual aggregation came last week.

But the report from ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski, which came out last week, illustrates what went wrong here. First, let’s cover the widely-spread story that [former NHL goalie and current Florida Panthers special advisor] “Roberto Luongo responded to a ‘goalie needed’ ad on Facebook and helped a beer league team defeat the 5-time defending champions in their playoff game 4-2.” Here are a few of those posts from prominent accounts on X/Twitter, all citing @bryceshockeylife on Instagram:

Those are just a few of the tweets along those lines, and countless media organizations wrote it up as fact based on the tweet. But where the “goalie needed ad” part of this came from is quite unclear. The first mention of that phrase on Twitter is the Sept. 10 tweet from @GinoHard_ above, which cites the @morning_skate account. However, their tweet of this made no mention of the “ad”:

Meanwhile, the Instagram account linked (from Florida Jr. Panthers 14uAA player Bryce Bargman) doesn’t have this as a permanent post, suggesting it was a short-term story for followers there. However, Bargman clearly has a connection to Luongo, with one of the last permanent videos he posted of him taking a shot on Luongo in January 2023. It’s possible his post made mention of the “ad,” or it’s possible it was just the video seen in these posts (which made no mention of an ad), and the “ad” came in from @GinoHard_’s aggregation of it.

At any rate, ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski did some digging on this and got a great story on how this actually came to be. That piece is worth reading in full, but here’s the key part of the ad.

It was not by responding to a “goalie needed” ad on Facebook, which was widely reported by media sites that aggregated the video this week. Terrific anecdote, unfortunately untrue.

“In reality, it was a combination of them needing a goalie and Luongo being at the practice that day and saying, ‘Hey, I’ll play,'” said Zach Randolph, adult hockey coordinator for the Panthers IceDen in Coral Springs.

Having current and former NHL players walking around the facility is commonplace, since many of their children skate at the rink.

…[Beer League Leafs captain Brad] Bargman had known Luongo for some time. He coached Luongo’s son Gianni, and Luongo now coaches Bargman’s son Bryce. He sometimes wondered if Luongo would suit up for the Beer League Leafs but felt that asking him would be “taking advantage of our friendship.”

…The Monday before the semifinal, Luongo and [former NHLer Petr] Schastlivy [who plays for the rival No Regretzkies] were both in the Panthers IceDen coaches’ room with Bargman.

“Hey Petr. Big game on Thursday. By the way, this is our goalie. Roberto’s our goalie,” Bargman joked to Schastlivy.

Amidst the laughter, Luongo said he’d actually consider filling in for the Leafs.

So, yes, Bryce Bargman is the captain’s son here and plays for a Luongo-coached team, and Brad Bargman has coached Luongo’s son. (Oh, and, strangely enough, the two of them have previously been famous for off-ice things; they were the two people who wore Florida Panthers’ jerseys to a Tampa Bay Lightning playoff game against the team in 2021, recorded arena employees’ attempts to enforce the Lightning’s no-opposing-jersey policy, and got that policy changed, as Wyshynski wrote up then.)

Thus, that’s not exactly a Facebook ad from a random person or even a Rent-a-Goalie situation; it’s Luongo suiting up for a friend’s team and doing so against a team with their ex-NHLer (Schastlivy, who scored 18 goals in 129 NHL games and had a two-decade pro career, mainly in Russia’s KHL). And Wyshynski’s piece goes into that being why the opposing team (which actually started by breaking off from the Beer League Leafs partly due to a dispute about ex-pros) accepted Luongo coming in for a playoff game without a minimum of previous games played (a common criticism these initial tweets got on social media), given the specific situation here.

This was a case where the Beer League Leafs’ regular goalie was unavailable, and goalies are particularly hard to replace. The No Regretzkies had their own ex-pro in Schastlivy, so league coordinator Randolph signed off on this. Luongo partly wanted to do this to prepare to be on the ice in his hometown of Montreal during his day with the Stanley Cup.

It is funny that Luongo only told Wyshynski, “It’s an urban legend story, and I prefer to leave it that way.” It certainly grew into one with the “Facebook ad” aggregation. But the actual story makes more sense, and I commend Wyshynski for taking the time to report it (and Bargman and Randolph for discussing what actually happened).

As for bad aggregation scoring, it’s unclear how exactly the “Facebook ad” misinformation came in, and the rest of these tweets were at least somewhat properly sourced (an actual link to Bryce Bargman’s Instagram page would have been better). But the error certainly got in there somehow and was spread without checking if there was an ad like this, and there don’t appear to have been any linked updates to those tweets after the true story came out. So we’ll give everyone here who repeated the “ad” claim a 3.

Rating: ***

2. NFL Rookie Watch claims, “Sanders immaturity is DEFINITELY a red flag for NFL scouts”

There’s a lot of bad aggregation around the Colorado Buffaloes, given their high profile, and QB Shedeur Sanders is a key part of that. Last week, I covered the kerfuffle around inaccurate aggregation of reports on his song and the team’s fight song (“It’s a lot more nuanced than that!”). This time around, there was some bad aggregation of his refusal to shake hands with Colorado State QB Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi after the Buffaloes’ 28-9 win over the Rams, particularly shown by @NFLRookieWatxh:

As Fox Sports personality (and noted Colorado-backing AP voter) Mike Hill noted, there’s significant context here, both with longer clips of this specific situation and with Fowler-Nicolosi’s comments in advance of the game:

Fowler-Nicolosi particularly said, “Let’s see how far Instagram followers get them” (amidst other comments from Colorado State players about both last year’s close loss and this year’s upcoming game). And Sanders went into his actions more on his own podcast later this week:

On his “2Legendary” podcast, Sanders explained his rejection was a response to trash talk from Fowler-Nicolosi. Sanders said he felt disrespected and didn’t want to act like everything was all good between the two.

“After the game, I said something to the Colorado State quarterback because he was talking crazy on social media, and he was really doing it for the clicks,” Sanders said. “… Yeah, I said something because I’m human. You’re not gonna keep talking crazy about us and keep talking crazy like you like that, and the whole time you not like that at all.”

…”It felt like a lot of hate to me personally, but of course the media tried to portray it like I did something wrong,” Sanders said. “That’s just how it is. We understood what’s going on, so we don’t get affected by it anymore.”

It absolutely can be debated whether Sanders should have shaken hands with Fowler-Nicolosi regardless of this, as Colin Cowherd and (former Colorado QB) Joel Klatt did this week. But the way “NFL Rookie Watch” aggregated this sans context and cited “Sanders immaturity” (sic: using possessive apostrophes properly is its own sign of maturity) as “DEFINITELY a red flag” was highly questionable. (Oh, and they didn’t even cite the source of the video, which appears to be Deion Sanders Jr. on YouTube.)

Rating: *****

1. My Mixtapez becomes the latest to spread false reports on Mark Davis and Hayden Hopkins

Back in May, there was an incredible round of social misinformation on 69-year-old Las Vegas Raiders’ owner Mark Davis supposedly being the father of 26-year-old model Hayden Hopkins’ baby, with Pat McAfee even repeating that false information on WWE Raw and later apologizing for it. That came even after Hopkins took to Instagram to verify that she was not in a relationship with Davis and that she appeared in his owner’s box in 2022 only as a “neighbor/friend.” And TMZ later reported that she’s expecting a child with MLB player Joey Gallo.

Somehow, though, rumors on Hopkins and Davis started circulating again this month. That led to even sites like ComingSoon putting out posts refuting the relationship. But that hasn’t shot all of those rumors down. And a remarkable new circulation of those came from a widely-repeated claim that Davis said Hopkins didn’t know he was a billionaire, and was “just attracted to his beautiful smile.” There are a ton of posts on Hopkins and Davis on Twitter/X with that text, some dating back to July, but one of the biggest and most recent came from @MyMixtapez, an account associated with a rap and hip-hop app with more than 829,000 followers:

That is certainly one way to promote your app. (But their general feed does seem to be rap and hip-hop news, so maybe it works.) But it’s not good aggregation. And while we don’t even really know what exactly they’re aggregating, but whatever it is, it’s not accurate.

Rating: *****

Aggregator standings (these are bad): 

@_MLFootball: 23
@NFL_DovKleiman: 17
@SKProFootball: 15
X/Grok: 10
@mymixtapez: 5
@NFLRookieWatxh: 5
Colin Cowherd: 5
@jasrifootball: 5
Redditor @thefortitude: 5
@GolazoAmerica: 5
@Spotify_Swift: 5
Barstool Sports: 4
Fan Recap: 4
@GinoHard_: 3
@BR_OpenIce: 3
@theScore: 3
@ThePlayersTV: 3
@SleeperNFL: 3
@PHLEaglesNation: 3
@DiscussingFilm: 3
@CBSSportsGolazo: 3
@BR_Betting: 3
@SportsCenter: 2
@TheDunkCentral: 2

Aggregation subject standings (these are not bad):

@deionsandersjr on YouTube: 5
@TheABinKC: 5
@TheDunkCentral: 5
Kent Babb/The Washington Post: 5
Pat Brennan/The Cincinnati Enquirer: 5
AFP: 5
Reuters: 5
The U.S. Sun: 5
Mark Craig/The (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune: 5
Mike Florio/Pro Football Talk: 5
Mike Silver/The San Francisco Chronicle: 5
DenverSports.com: 4
TWSN: 4
@bryceshockeylife on Instagram: 3
@morning_skate: 3
@AryePulli: 3
Big Play Slay: 3
The 25/10 Show: 3
Deadline: 3
Ryan Michael: 3
Tom Fornelli/CBS Sports: 3
Jay Glazer/Fox Sports: 2
Natasha Dye/People: 2
Clarence Hill/The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: 2
@AZCardinals: 2

Thanks for reading This Week In Bad Aggregation! User submissions are always welcome via e-mail or 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