All Ian Rapoport could do was shake his head as he recalled a “bizarre” first day of NFL free agency on the Awful Announcing Podcast. How could he forget about X suffering multiple outages? He and his insider counterparts like Adam Schefter and Dianna Russini were forced to flock to alternate social media sites like Bluesky and Threads in droves. NFL media members like Rapoport saw their Bluesky followers soar following the X free agency outage, except for Schefter, who is oddly not on the social media network.
Rapoport described the experience, during which he implored NFL Network viewers to forget about the Elon Musk-owned social media app and tune into TV, as “really disorienting.”
“So much goes into free agency. There’s like a month of prep, right?” Rapoport told AA podcast host Brandon Contes. “This job is very fun, don’t get me wrong. I’m very, very, very fortunate to have this job, but there’s a lot of misery to it. It’s grinding and planning, putting lists together, and triangulating where everybody could go — it’s a lot… We all help each other in different ways and have an awesome team.”
But it’s mainly Tom Pelissero who’s responsible—and helpful—in organizing Rapoport. “It’s a whole process, but that disorganized me,” Rapoport said of X’s outage. “It was disorienting and weird, because you didn’t know what anyone had… I have a guy who works with me, Shahab—I talked about this on the [Pat] McAfee Show—who helps me with some of my social media stuff. For whatever reason, he could tweet from my account, so I was sending him tweets that I would put up. I didn’t know what I broke, what I didn’t break, if it got through, who had what, what deals had been out there. I think I broke Chris Godwin going back to the Bucs, but, honestly I have no idea. I have no idea.”
Like it or not, X (formerly Twitter) serves as a scoreboard. “I had no idea who broke what or anything,” said Rapoport. “It’s all fine, and I enjoyed being like, ‘Watch TV; we’ll give it to you there.’ But, I sort of exist in my routine and what I’m used to, and what I expect. Every year, the calendar’s the same. I know what to prepare for, and that really threw me. And it was kind of weird.” Did it make Rapoport rethink his social media strategy? “I do it all. I put everything else everywhere,” he says. “I’m on Bluesky. I’m on Threads. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. I’m on all of them. It would be great if there was a bot that just simul-tweeted, or whatever, simul-sent everything, but there’s not because they’re all competitors… But I’m everywhere. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on YouTube. You just never know where it’s all gonna come from or where people get their news, so I try to spread it out and try to be as efficient as possible.”
“People will say, ‘Oh, you got to get off Twitter,’ and I’m sort of like, ‘Maybe one day,’” Rapoport added. “You can’t converse on Twitter anymore… I used to look at my verified mentions; half the world’s verified now. You can’t even look. I can’t do anything on Twitter except receive tweets and send tweets. There are other platforms that are much better for communicating, but this is our world now.” That it is.
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