There has been a lot of strange discussion around NFL Twitter/X accounts over the years, and much of it has revolved around Dov Kleiman. Kleiman’s @NFL_DovKleiman account had more than 266,000 followers as of Thursday afternoon, and those include many prominent players and other media figures.
That’s sometimes led to drama. At times, that’s been over Kleiman’s particular relaying of reports from others (including Trey Wingo, Mike Florio, and TMZ), with some of that criticism about Kleiman’s framing of stories and some of it misdirected criticism for the original outlet. At other times, that’s been about Kleiman himself, with New York City radio station WFAN’s Boomer and Gio in particular suggesting that Kleiman might not “really exist” or might be “a plant for Tom Brady.” (The question of if Kleiman exists or not was largely addressed by Ryan Glasspiegel of The New York Post in March, with an article featuring photos he provided and discussion of him appearing on Zoom meetings at Outkick and BroBible, outlets he wrote for.)
The latest drama with Kleiman comes around some very bold accusations from the @TheGameDayNFL account. There, the hosts of the associated Caps Off podcast put out an eight-minute video Thursday. They said that after a long investigation of who was sending tweets criticizing other NFL reporter or aggregator accounts from the TheGameDayNFL account, they concluded it was Kleiman.
That conclusion was due to noting similar language in unauthorized tweets from the GameDay account and from other accounts that they said were linked to Kleiman. And they offered further support by discussing checking an unauthorized old TweetDeck Chrome application. That application had Kleiman’s account still listed as someone with access thanks to a Twitter takeover he did of that account for one game years ago. The discussion of the specific claims on Kleiman starts around 3:15 here:
https://twitter.com/TheGameDayNFL/status/1743005487975600529
The real key quotes there, from the Caps Off podcast’s Felipe Fontes, come around 6:30. Here’s a partial transcription:
“This Chrome extension allowed him to still have access, no matter how many times we changed the password. …He probably thought we would never figure it out.”
There’s also quite the commentary from Jack Parodi of that podcast, starting around 7:00:
“Think about how much of a loser and how little of a life you would have to have. The amount of time this man has taken just to do this to attack other people…Dov, you are a f****** loser, get a life, do not just take other people down just to make yourself feel better. Do something productive, and don’t be a d***.”
In the wake of that video, Awful Announcing reached out to Kleiman for comment. Kleiman said he did not tweet from the @TheGameDayNFL account following that brief authorized one-game access the group here discusses. He said they did not reach out to him for comment before posting this video, said their video doesn’t live up to its headline claims of “hack,” and that their discussion of his access three years ago is not proof he sent any further tweets, theorizing that they’re targeting him for attention. He also said he didn’t respond on his platform to not provide them extra attention. “They want to play a game.. but I can’t play a game with someone that admittedly lies.”
It is worth mentioning as well that past profiles on Kleiman have discussed his work at BroBible. The author page for him there now cites him as “a former BroBible sports writer and associate editor,” and his last article there is from November. When asked for comment on that, Kleiman said “I removed them from my personal Bio on the same day we parted ways. I was approached to write in two other places since then but I’m focusing less on Twitter/NFL now and more on other things but the account is still operated the same.”
These are certainly notable accusations from the Caps Off crew here that it was Kleiman who sent the @TheGameDayNFL account tweets they’re upset about. And, interestingly, they found Kleiman still had access to that account via an old browser extension. But that is not proof that this was Kleiman, and his straight-up denial of sending any tweets from @TheGameDayNFL after his brief authorized access is quite important to have on the record. At the moment, this is an interesting controversy in the NFL social media world, but one without a lot of firm conclusions.
