Well, it wasn’t a gas mask bong this year.
Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen has some last-minute explaining to do, after the Internet exhumed some offensive tweets from his high school days.
The tweets, all of which have since been deleted, were published by Yahoo Sports. Some contain some racially insensitive, and well, just stupid messages. The kind of things dumb high school kids say, if those high school kids grow up without realizing there are certain words they don’t get to say, even if they use the casual version that ends with an "-a” (though there were a few that include the full “N” word).
He also tweeted: “I hate LeBron!!!!! #LeBronSucks” in 2011, which is only a problem in that it is empirically wrong and bad form if he ends up in Cleveland.
Most of the posts come from 2012 and 2013, when Allen was in high school in rural Firebaugh, Ca.
There’s no excuse (other than youthful ignorance) for the tweets themselves, but there are a few other layers of shamefulness involved here.
First, his agents should have plowed through his 9,051 tweets at some point well before the eve of the draft, found the offensive ones, and deleted them before anyone had a chance to embarrass him with his own words.
There’s also something disturbing about anyone going through the tweets of a teenager looking for smear material, as has happened in recent years to athletes and others. But when people go looking for the spotlight of social media, eventually it’s going to shine back on them, and illuminate every fault.