ESPN account @SportsCenter just tweeted “sports”

It’s always interesting to see what happens with unusual tweets. One, from ESPN’s @SportsCenter account, which has 40.7 million followers, quickly caught the eye on Thursday:

sports

— Sports Center (@SportsCenter) September 1, 2022

Just 10 minutes after it was first tweeted, there were over 500 retweets and over 3,000 likes. These numbers continue to grow. And that led to some fun responses, including from the NFL, SB Nation (officially SportsBlogs Nation), Stadium, US Open Tennis, and more:

Soccer

– NFL (@NFL) September 1, 2022

blog nation

— SB Nation (@SBNation) September 1, 2022

stadium

— Stadium (@Stadium) September 1, 2022

of which tennis is a part

— US Open Tennis (@usopen) September 1, 2022

The Washington Post followed suit on the news side:

new

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 1, 2022

And the Portland Pickles, an independent minor league baseball team, had an editorial comment instead:

your Portland Pickles cover has been missing for a long time

— Portland Pickles (@picklesbaseball) September 1, 2022

It’s unclear why @SportsCenter would simply tweet “sport”, but it sounds like things like British politician Ed Balls’ (at the time, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer) tweet of his name in 2011:

Ed Balls

— Ed Balls (@edballs) April 28, 2011

ESPN’s social accounts have undergone a significant transformation over the past few years, particularly following the January 2020 hire of Bleacher Report/House of Highlights’ Omar Raja. Some of this change was seen as negative by many. And that’s especially true when it comes to those accounts tweeting out-of-context quote graphics, an approach that has caught fire from athletes and media personalities for inappropriate attribution. It’s also sometimes even drawn criticism of their own personalities. But, fortunately, there is no special need to assign “sports”. And it’s far from the worst thing you can tweet.

It’s also been interesting to see how far the @SportsCenter account has strayed from things that might actually appear on the show. sports center. It’s become much more of a general purpose “sports” account, often indistinguishable from @espn. And while it’s unclear what their intention was to simply tweet “sports”, it certainly got @SportsCenter a lot of attention. It’s not yet clear if this was intentional, or if it’s something they could have changed if they had access to the edit button. Either way, a pivot to “sports-only” tweeting can best be described by fake ESPN8 The Ocho commentator Pepper Brooks:

[SportsCenter on Twitter]