Despite What Adam Schefter Says, Josh Allen Tweets Were Not Deleted in January

Despite my belief that Josh Allen’s tweets shouldn’t impact his draft position, it is nevertheless malpractice on the part of his camp that these tweets were able to surface on the eve of the Draft. This has happened enough times that every NBA and NFL prospect should just delete all of their old tweets and start fresh as they enter the draft process.

Adam Schefter suggested both on social media and on First Take (at the 1:50-mark below) that there may have been something sinister at play:

“The timing is rather strange,” Schefter said. “Just in the last hour a couple people have floated the theory — and I emphasize it’s just a theory — that perhaps another team actually did this to Josh Allen in the hopes that he would fall to them. Because the timing is so odd that it would happen right before the Draft when my understanding is his social media account was gone through back in January and the tweets were removed back then. So somebody captured them and saved them and released them now.”

However, this statement does not match up with the way that tweets are embedded in web publishing. Yahoo’s story about the tweets did not include screengrabs; when I saw the story the tweets had been deleted from Allen’s account but the way they remained on Yahoo were in the format of tweets that existed when the post was published but were deleted afterwards.

Yahoo writer Ryan Young confirmed my suspicion. “At the time I published, they had not been deleted,” Young said via DM. “We found them directly on his Twitter page, and were able to embed them because they were still live. At least the ones that we found. He could have deleted more and/or other tweets in January.”

So, while it’s certainly possible that Allen’s team deleted many of his old tweets back in January, they missed at least two of them that contained the n-word.