We tried to troll Ole Miss fans and accidentally trolled Sports Illustrated

There are times in life when you do one thing with a particular goal in mind, but something else happens that you never expected. Such was the case for us here at For Whom the Cowbell Tolls last night.

Myself and Noah Mashburn, one of the hosts of In the Dawghouse, tweeted just a few seconds apart about the latest Grumors and how it was going to be obvious that Jon Gruden would be tied to the Rebels.

We started joking about that in our Slack channel where we communicate with each other about Mississippi State or other random stuff. This led to a conversation about how it would be funny if certain coaches started to be rumored for the Ole Miss job.

Then it occurred to me, “Hey, why don’t we start the rumor?” So we did.

Our intent was to troll Ole Miss fans into thinking they had struck gold by making it appear Chip Kelly was pursuing the head coaching job. After they discovered the news wasn’t real, their dreams would be crushed.

So I decided to take an old account I used to use before I started blogging and make it look like Pat Forde’s Twitter account. It had been so long since I used the account I had to have the password reset because I couldn’t remember it. If you want proof it is mine, that account and my personal Facebook account were linked. Almost all of the previous tweets are links to my Facebook account. I changed the handle to @YahoooForde (faking his handle isn’t easy, so I just added an extra o). I also changed the avatar and profile banner to match his. And then I tweeted this from the account.

Some people took the bait, and others didn’t. A lot of people have undone their retweets or deleted where they quote tweeted it. There were some Rebel fans in there, so we had our fun.

The one thing I did NOT expect, was for a national publication to run a story on it. There was a time it used to be easier to pull off these types of trolls because so many national writers use tweetdeck when they are on Twitter. Tweetdeck did not include the blue check mark on verified accounts until recently. Now that it does, people don’t fall for trolls as often as they used to.

But there is obviously someone at Sports Illustrated who didn’t notice the lack of a blue check mark either. I woke up this morning to see this from Deadspin.

So, to the folks at Sports Illustrated, our apologies. We were just trying to have a little fun with our in-state rivals. I hope this doesn’t make the Egg Bowl Rivalry any more toxic.