OK, I made a mistake tonight and I’m confessing my sins publicly on the blog. I deleted a diary that was put up about the supposed trade of Akin Ayodele, Anthony Henry and draft picks to the Falcons for DeAngelo Hall and some draft picks.
Let me explain why I did this and why it was a rash, heavy-handed decision.
I thought that everyone would realize that this ‘rumored’ trade was really nothing more than someone posting on a message board and having a little fun. When someone writes about a very specific trade, with some pretty big names involved and claims that is was mentioned on ESPN, then no credible sports site follows up on it, especially ESPN since they are supposedly the source, I thought that would throw up red flags all over the place. How does a guy on a message board know the details of a trade of this magnitude and yet ESPN, FOX Sports, Yahoo, the DMN and the DMN blog, the Star-T, Hashmarks and everyone else in the known universe not know about it? To me, that was pretty obvious proof that it was a fraud. Plus, it followed on the heels of another rumor involving MB3, DeAngelo Hall and draft picks that was supposedly mentioned by Adam Schefter on Total Access, once again a ‘rumor’ that no one followed up on the next day.
I’m very conscientious about the things written on BTB and I want it to be a site that people can trust. That’s one reason why I always ask for links to other sites when people use them as a source, then we can check the veracity of the report for ourselves. By the way, the person that posted the diary followed all these rules so he wasn’t at fault at all. But for some reason I thought it might reflect badly on the blog to propagate the ‘rumor’ and I acted rashly and without thought. Through an email exchange with the author he mentioned that he just wanted to see what you guys would think about the supposed trade. So it’s a fine-line between posting something as a ‘truth’ and posting something to drive discussion. Again, I acted too quickly and regret it. In the future though, if you post something like this, please note it as a rumor, or even a rumor of a rumor, as it is in this case.
It’s the silly season for the NFL, so all kinds of things are going to get mentioned all over the place. Please be careful and examine the sources of rumors before deciding about them. I don’t want to limit discussion so you should be free to post things just for discussion sake. This is your blog, too.
So to the whole BTB community, mea culpa. To the author of the specific diary, I apologize.
Everybody can make mistakes, and since I run a public forum, sometimes I have to apologize publicly. There it is.
Of course, if the rumored trade actually turns out to be true, then I’m a bigger dork than I already am. ;-)