The Troll is Coming From Inside THE House
Sometimes you gotta read the room. Or not.
The title of “Greatest Tweet of All Time” was supposed to be unawardable. From the moment they first activated that infernal hellsite, it has been believed by foremost Twitter scientists that there could only be a pantheon of the Great Tweets, not a single Greatest Tweet. Legends like Four Eels and “who’s this clown” and please stop praying for my grandpa and moon’s haunted huddle atop the highest servers to decide the fates of mortal tweets. And I too subscribed to this theory… until Monday.
Before we get there, you need a little backstory.
Coming into January 16, 2023, Ohio State was, as the kids say, down bad. They were dealing with some stuff. Much to ponder. They needed to think about some things. They were coming off consecutive losses for the first time since 2013. The first was a devastating 22-point blowout home loss to archrival Michigan, and the second was a heartbreaking last-second one point loss to Georgia that almost certainly cost them a National Championship. Then the #1 player in the nation in the 2024 recruiting class decommitted in favor of Nebraska.
Meanwhile, hated Michigan had gotten a string of good news on the roster front. They landed the Big Ten’s best portal class, and then they managed to hold onto three All-Big Ten players — Blake Corum, Zak Zinter, and Trevor Keegan — along with several other draftable prospects. Michigan did that. Michigan. NIL Luddite Michigan. Basic Bitch Michigan. A school allegedly MILES behind in the NIL game whose head coach had one foot out the door.
But, as you would expect from a group onto whom the Sporting Gods have showered endless and completely unearned favor for the past two decades, Buckeye Nation figured something had to break their way. It had been weeks — WEEKS — since they had fallen ass-backwards into a pile of recently abandoned treasure. And as the NFL Draft entry deadline approached, Buckeye fans noticed that all-world quarterback CJ Stroud, a projected Top 5 pick, had been quiet. Strangely quiet. Maybe TOO quiet.
The Internet started to entertain rumblings — vague, sourceless rumblings, of course — that Stroud might return for one more season. The Powers That Be were assembling a massive NIL package. Ten million dollars? Fifteen million dollars? Sure, it was unlikely… but it was possible.
And then, bright and early on Monday morning, the last day for players to enter the draft…
Brian Schottenstein isn’t just some dude. He is a member of “Columbus’s last dynasty” (which, despite what you would think when you hear “Columbus dynasty,” somehow doesn’t trace its roots to workout supplements or the band Staind). He’s also a founding member, along with Cardale Jones1, of THE Foundation, an Ohio State Name, Image, and Likeness collective. It is one of the three collectives officially recognized and supported by Ohio State. The Board of THE Foundation includes such Ohio State luminaries as D’Angelo Russell, JT Barrett, and… /double-checks notes/… Urban Meyer. These guys are supposed to be the tip of the spear in this new age of college athletics. Just last week Schottenstein gave an interview talking about how THE Foundation is hard at work trying to “keep the players that are here.”
And who is the first athlete listed on THE Foundation’s website under “Student-Athlete Partnerships?” Yep, you guessed it:
This was it. The Bat Signal. Ohio State media picked up on it. National media picked up on it. The outlines of a thousand thinkpieces about this inflection point in the nature of college sports were already being drafted. And then, three hours later, Stroud dropped the bombshell that, sure enough, he would… leave Ohio State and enter the NFL draft.
A stunned, spray-tanned Buckeye Nation, having only recently gotten their hopes so high, came crashing back to reality. Okay, they thought, but maybe THE Foundation was going to announce some other significant development that would cushion the blow. Maybe a major portal transfer? Someone withdrawing from the draft and returning to school?
But only twelve minutes after the Stroud announcement, Schottenstein put the speculation to rest.
It was a gender reveal.
Look, no one likes elaborate gender reveals under the best of circumstances. While sexual identity and gender expression are complex topics, when it comes to ultrasounds, you’re only ever getting one of two answers. No one has ever been surprised by the outcome of a gender reveal, just like no one has ever watched the coin toss to start a football game and said “HOLY SHIT” at the outcome. No one has ever cut into a “?!?!?!?!?!?” cake and revealed green and yellow striped funfetti. And as someone with several children, I feel comfortable saying this: the answer also doesn’t matter to 95% of the people in your life. It is the “no one cares about your fantasy team” of personal announcements, except if there were only two draftable players in your fantasy league, and everyone used auto-draft. Gender reveals have also killed seven people and burned tens of thousands of acres in the past five years. But I digress.
The human gestation period is approximately 40 weeks. That’s 280 days. Maybe you don’t want to make an announcement in the first trimester, but okay, that still leaves approximately 187 days to choose from. Dude chose that day, and that time of that day. And he didn’t just choose to drop the video. He did the BIG NEWS COMIN’ eyeball emoji thinking emoji prayer hands emoji tweet. And when people picked up on the original tweet immediately as almost certainly being about Stroud, Schottenstein didn’t say ANYTHING to the contrary. He didn’t add a “no, it’s not that, it’s personal news” or make any attempt to correct the record. He just let it marinate. For THREE HOURS.
It was also an astonishing self-own: he announced good news in way that would guarantee that the most toxic fanbase in America would actively be pissed at his wife and unborn child. He had to turn off the replies. And now he has to go asking those same people for money based on the premise that he has his finger on the pulse of the Ohio State community.
If a Michigan fan had pulled off a troll of Ohio State fans this elaborate and successful, we would mount it to the hoods of our cars. It would be on our résumés under “Special Skills.” But for someone whose job is to wrangle Ohio State boosters to do so is… my god. Perfect. No notes.
Congrats on the sex, tho.
To be clear, none of this is to be taken as shade at Cardale Jones. Cardale is one of the greatest living Americans. We brook no argument with 12-Gauge.
"It was a gender reveal."
One simple sentence like a rusty blade through the heart