It’s time to stop reading too far into the social media activity of Lions players
Stop freaking out about Kerby Joseph’s Twitter.
I’m going on a bit of a rant here because this stuff is super annoying. It’s not just a thing Detroit Lions fans do; this is a thing that all sports fans do, and now it’s spread into media, too.
There’s been a huge reliance on the social media of players to tell us some kind of story, and then people see some of that stuff, and they take it into their brains and turn it into something so much bigger than it actually is. Don’t worry, I brought examples.
Kerby Joseph taking a break from social media
We’ll start here because this is the latest thing. Kerby Joseph has an injury right now. He returned to practice on Monday in a limited role per Dan Campbell, but it’s been a while since he’s played.
Since he’s normally active on social media, fans took the deactivation of his accounts as his season was over, and it couldn’t mean anything else. That’s just not what’s happening here.
Can you blame him? On Sunday, people took a small comment about his knee and turned it into him having long-term knee damage he’ll never get over, and then started talking about ways that the Lions can get out of his contract.
They were saying some of this stuff in the comments of his tweets. I would bail off social media if everyone wanted to talk about a report from an internet doctor who’s never looked at my knee in person, too. Especially if everyone took that information and started talking about how they don’t want me around anymore.
The whole thing where my article about a possible Jameson Williams trade not only influenced the league, but also made Williams think the Lions were really going to trade him
What a perfect storm this one was. Ahead of the 2025 NFL Draft, I wrote an editorial about how the Lions trading Jameson Williams at the draft could free up a lot of cash and allow them to draft Matthew Golden, whom they had just had a top 30 meeting with. In an unforeseen coincidence, Williams had a few things on his Instagram story that looked way more like relationship troubles than something about thinking he might get traded.
But seriously, do you believe there is a world where Jameson Williams is, first off, reading my articles? And then getting upset about them, thinking I have some sort of control over Brad Holmes and his decision-making? Don’t you think if he did see them, he’d reach out to the Lions and ask before reacting to it online? I mean, would he need to? I cover the team, and it was clearly an opinion.
NFL Insider Albert Breer reporting that teams believe the Lions may trade Williams a couple of days after my article certainly didn’t help. Lions fans believed that actual NFL GMs got that information from me as if my opinion was actual information. The internet sucks sometimes.
Jameson Williams posting the “bored” meme during the bye week
A super easy one to figure out. The guy loves football and now has to go a week without it. So he’s going to be bored. Some fans and media took that as Williams being upset that he wasn’t getting the targets that everyone thought he would get.
Williams, of course, said that had nothing to do with that, and anyone who’s been around Williams for longer than five minutes knows that he is all team and only cares about playing football and winning.
The whole taking the team name out of your social media profile thing
I can’t stand this one the most. All it takes is one crappy NFL aggregator speculating about a player getting traded. Then, a few people notice that the player doesn’t have their team name or a picture of themselves in their uniform on their Instagram.
So, they take it to Twitter and say, “So and so took ‘Lions’ out of his IG bio,” along with the eyes emoji, and it takes off from there. The major problem is that you don’t know if it was ever in there to begin with. You just assume it was because you’ve seen other players do that. There are many players on the Lions right now whose Instagrams don’t have “Lions” in the bio, and they don’t have pictures of them in their uniforms as their profile picture. It doesn’t mean any of them are disgruntled or are getting traded.
I understand that in the past, some social media posts have led to actual events. Usually, it’s a player saying goodbye before they’re cut. Isaiah Buggs is the only time a cryptic tweet led to anything. Other than that, these guys have personal lives. Not everything is related to their lives with the Lions. We have to stop freaking out about this stuff.
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