Adam Schefter’s Nick Chubb Tweet Was Perfectly Fine

Nick Chubb went down with a gruesome knee injury during the Cleveland Browns’ loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday Night Football and will be sidelined for the rest of the year. It was as about as nasty as it gets and the type of video that sadly allows some fairly safe speculation. Whatever the exact diagnosis is — and we’ll get that in short order — it won’t be good.

Shortly after Chubb was carted off, ESPN’s top NFL insider Adam Schefter tweeted out what to me seems like a fairly innocuous bit of information in that signature cadence and composition he’s created over the years. “Nick Chubb dislocated his left knee and tore his MCL, PCL, and LCL with cartilage damage on October 10, 2015 vs. Tennessee. He injured the same knee tonight vs. Pittsburgh.”

Two sentences. Less than 30 words. Accurate information. A little weird, yes, but that’s what we’ve all come to expect from Schefter over the years for better or worse. One would be forgiven for seeing it, reading it, and moving on to the next thing. Which is what I did, only to learn hours later it became a bit of a thing because Schefter made the apparently egregious error of not wording his tweet better and believing the public at large could work their way through two clear sentences.

Going through these assorted pieces, it appears there are two main points. That some fans initially thought Schefter was reporting this as a new injury because they like to read fast and that he was doing it all for engagement. And I get the first part. If you’re just cruising through a ton of information at all times you could initially be tricked. But like, then you can actually read the words and then you’ll understand. This world has provided us a magic elixir to fix the problem of momentary confusion. The second part doesn’t make much sense either because there was no link to anything and everything Schefter posts gets retweeted and quickly disseminated everywhere anyway.

Look, no offense to anyone who actually got upset or mad or needed to blast the No. 1 insider here. There are lots of things to get furious about and this is certainly one of them. Life’s too short to tell others that life’s too short to get worked up over this. Where some people see tragedy, though, others see comedy. To me, Schefter’s biggest and only sin here was sounding like a recurring Arrested Development bit.

Anyway, plenty more to get worked up about today. Let’s dive right in.