A fake Twitter account briefly fooled the college football world into thinking Ole Miss hired Mike Leach
It’s that time of the year.
The college football coaching carousel is in full swing with a number of programs looking to make hires and moves early into the recruiting cycle. This season also brings out the weirdest faction of sports Twitter — Fake Coaching Hire Twitter.
And on Monday, the college football world was thrown for a loop by one of the more believable fake accounts we’ve seen in a quite some time.
Less than 24 hours after Ole Miss announced the firing of head coach Matt Luke, a Twitter account purporting to be 247Sports Ole Miss beat writer David Johnson tweeted a graphic to announce that the Rebels had hired Washington State coach Mike Leach.
It was the little details that made the tweet believable, and the tweet indeed fooled plenty of fans and media members.
The fake account had 5,600 followers and changed all the details to mirror Johnson’s account. Johnson’s real account had a handle of @Rebels247 while the fake account simply capitalized an “I” to look like a lowercase “L” for the handle, “@RebeIs247.”
As far as fakes go, this was one heck of an effort.
Typically, fans and reporters can spot the fake accounts by looking for the blue verified checkmark, but Johnson’s genuine account was not verified. Even he was confused by the faker’s effort, initially thinking that his account had been hacked.
Johnson eventually set his pinned tweet to clarify that he never tweeted that Ole Miss hired Mike Leach.
The actual culprit was a fan account called “Bourbon Ghost,” which had been active since 2010 (another reason his fake was believable). The account eventually changed the avatar and handle back once the Leach tweet went viral, but the bio still included Johnson’s 247Sports information.
And with that, the Mike Leach era at Ole Miss came to an end.