After beating Baltimore, the Saints' account quote-tweeted an ordinary Ravens fan who had trash-talked them, and the Eagles spent Sunday night dunking on Tennessee. One side says this is the most fun the league has been in years and fans started it. The other says a billion-dollar franchise punching down at a guy with 300 followers is a bad look — pick a lane.
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Add your commentHard disagree with the whole "they started it" argument. You're a franchise worth 4 billion dollars. The moment you decide a random dude with 312 followers deserves a public callout from your official account, you've lost the room. There's no version of that story where the franchise looks cool. None.
I grew up in Philadelphia. Eagles fans trash talk literally everyone including each other. The Tennessee guy knew what jersey he was putting on when he started typing. I have zero sympathy and I'm not pretending to.
I used to think this was harmless until it happened to my uncle. He posted one mildly salty tweet after the Chargers knocked out his team in 2022 and the team account QT'd it and suddenly he had 8,000 notifications, half of them genuinely nasty. He deleted the app for two months. These franchises know exactly what they're unleashing when they do this.
The Eagles one was genuinely funny. I'm sorry. I watched it three times. The Titans fan they dunked on had literally typed "Eagles r done" four hours before kickoff and the account waited until the final whistle to reply. That's not punching down, that's comedy timing.
I manage social for a mid-size brand (not sports) and I will tell you exactly what's happening: these accounts have KPIs tied to impressions and follower growth, the dunks deliver both, the person who approved the tweet got praised in a Monday morning meeting, and no executive ever asked how the fan felt. This isn't malice, it's incentive structure. Fix the incentives or this never stops.
Okay the Apple comparison is not it at all. Apple responds to help people. The Saints account responded to humiliate someone. Those are not the same activity dressed in different clothes. Please think this through.
My hot take: the fans who are most upset about this are the ones most afraid it might happen to them next time they trash talk. The rest of us are fine.
I work in sports marketing. The pressure to go viral is absolutely suffocating right now. Every team has some 24-year-old in charge of the account being told to "be like the Wendy's account" and the only way to do that in football is to dunk on people. I'm not defending it, I'm just explaining why it keeps happening and will keep happening.
As a Ravens fan who was in those mentions Sunday, I want to say: most of us were fine. Some of us were idiots. The idiots got called out. This is how the internet works and has always worked. I don't need Roger Goodell to protect me from a quote tweet.
The part that gets me is the asymmetry. When fans trash-talk they're risking nothing — a few muted replies, maybe. When a franchise QT's them they're potentially wrecking that person's week or month. That imbalance matters regardless of who threw the first keyboard punch.
The person defending this because "engagement" needs to explain why engagement is a moral justification for anything. Lots of things get engagement. That doesn't make them right.
Every year this debate comes up. Every year the teams keep doing it. Every year the league says nothing. That should tell you everything about whether they actually think it's a problem.
To the person who said they changed their mind — I appreciate that. Genuinely. But the answer to that problem is Twitter's moderation policy, not a blanket rule that teams can never be playful online. One bad outcome doesn't define the whole practice.
okay but nobody said a word when Ravens fans were in Saints mentions calling them a fluke. funny how the rules only apply after you lose.
Someone earlier said "you're a franchise worth 4 billion dollars" like that's automatically disqualifying. Apple is worth 3 trillion dollars and they respond to customer complaints on Twitter constantly. Size of the entity doesn't determine whether a response is appropriate.
Worth something to you. Probably worth considerably less to the Titans fan being dogpiled.
What nobody's asking: what happens to the fan who gets quote-tweeted by a team account and then harassed by thousands of strangers? Does the NFL have any policy on this at all? Because I've looked and I cannot find one. That's the actual gap here.
The funniest part of this whole thread is everyone acting like NFL fans weren't already absolutely feral on social media before teams got involved. The teams didn't create this environment. They moved in after the neighborhood was already on fire.
To the person saying "they started it" — so your billion-dollar brand's social strategy is playground logic? Cool. Really professional.
If you disagree that this sets a bad precedent, explain how you square that with the fact that the NFL spent an entire decade trying to look like a professional league after years of conduct issues. You want the shield to mean something, you can't also be publicly mocking civilians.
Okay so the social media manager upthread is basically saying "the system made us do it" and I'm sorry but that's just a more articulate version of passing the buck. Someone decided to hit send. A human person. Own it.
The Wendy's account comparison upthread is exactly right and it's also exactly the problem. Wendy's is selling chicken sandwiches. The Eagles are supposed to represent a city. It's a different relationship and people keep pretending it isn't.
@the asymmetry point — I hear you but also: post publicly, get public responses. That's not asymmetry, that's just the internet. The fan chose to be on a public platform.
If you post "Team X is done" before the game even starts you are EXPLICITLY inviting a response. This isn't complicated.
The Titans fan defending the dunking on Titans fans is sending me. Respect honestly.
been a Saints fan since 1987. actual decades of heartbreak. let us have this one thing.
I changed my mind on this actually. I used to love when teams did this. Then I watched a video of the Bengals account doing something similar last year and the comments on that fan's tweet were genuinely vicious. Like personal stuff about his family vicious. That's when I realized the team isn't responsible for the first punch but they are responsible for every punch that follows.
i mean the ravens fan literally had a banner in his profile picture saying saints were going to choke. you go fishing you might catch something
I'm a Titans fan. I laughed at the Eagles tweet. We were bad on Sunday. You don't get to call yourself a fan and then refuse to take your lumps.
Everybody drawing hard lines here would feel completely different if it was their team going off on fans from a team they hate. You know it's true. I know it's true. Be honest with yourselves just once.
nobody dunked on anybody the way tennessee dunked on themselves in the third quarter just saying
my coworker showed me the eagles one at lunch yesterday and we both laughed for five minutes straight. that's worth something.
My son runs social media for a minor league hockey team and he says this stuff drives more engagement than anything else they do. It's basically the whole job now.
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