Much like professional sports, posting is a serious game. Perhaps that’s why so many athletes are so good at it. Think about the best tweet you’ve ever read—is it as good as the time Kevin Durant tweeted about watching the History Channel at the club? Probably not. So with the Super Bowl coming up this Sunday, I am proposing this: the Posters' Bowl.
We take the two teams already competing in the Super Bowl, and see which of them would win if the game were less about getting the ball into the end zone and more about creating posts that make me, the commissioner, laugh. It’s genius. The rules are simple: there are no points, just vibes. I comb through posts both recent and old, and see which roster has the better posters. Similarly to fantasy football, I only really care about what’s going on with the offensive starters. If there are incredible posts from a second-string defensive lineman, I have not seen or included them, sorry.
Hut, hut, hike!
Eagles
The Birds are off to a rough start in the Posters' Bowl. Quarterback Jalen Hurts has had a Twitter account since 2012, but any evidence of tweeting pre-2018 has been deleted. When he isn’t retweeting various sports outlets, he’ll post about how God is good and what a great game he just had. Try going back further, and it’s mostly stuff like this:
Snooze! Thankfully for the Eagles, they do have a prolific poster on the roster. It’s Hurts’s best friend, wide receiver A.J. Brown. This man has posted almost 23,000 tweets since joining Twitter in late 2011. That’s like 2,000 tweets a year. In 2014 he tweeted, “Homework flow . Gotta glow up one day 📚💭.” In 2015 he was “watching college football and thinking.” In 2016 he was up at 2:00 a.m. watching Annabelle. Most recently, he tweeted “I gotta learn the fight song 😭.” C’mon. That’s funny. My personal favorite is this one from last year, which he edited to include a direct call out to Roger Goodell:
Miles Sanders also has the poster’s spirit, with nearly 16,000 tweets in 12 years. Some of his heavy hitters include the three different years in which he wished a happy Father’s Day to both his and all moms, a Seinfeldian question about traffic, and this relatable gem:
Hell yeah, brother. Unfortunately the combined strength of Brown and Sanders might not be enough for the Eagles, seeing as Dallas Goedert, Jason Kelce, and Quez Watkins have almost no posting ability. Sadly, DeVonta Smith has been disqualified for hawking an NFT of his Heisman trophy recently enough that it’s embarrassing.
Chiefs
Unlike Hurts, Patrick Mahomes has a lot of posts to his name. Some of them are pretty good, like this one that I’m going to willfully misinterpret as being about the quarterback’s need to tweet:
I would estimate that a couple thousand of Mahomes’s tweets are him saying “Let’s go” with varying numbers of exclamation points. He tweeted it when Kyrie Irving got traded to the Mavericks, he tweeted it when he opened the first Whataburger in Kansas, he tweeted it at the U.S. women’s soccer team when they advanced to the Olympic semifinals in 2021, he tweeted it when they re-aired his NFL draft on ESPN2. Whether he knows it or not, he has committed to a years-long bit, which gives him a leg up on Hurts.
The Chiefs are actually kind of a poster’s team. While JuJu Smith-Schuster does not have an incredible Twitter presence, his TikTok account is full of gems, including this one in which he stands under a bridge in Kansas City and declares it a “new spot”:
Marquez Valdes-Scantling is a natural born poster, but really shines when he’s tweeting about his home state of Florida. He has several posts about the weather, but there is one obvious Florida tweet that is better than all of his other Florida tweets:
Perfect post. A 19-year-old boy tweeting a low-quality photo of St. Petersburg? That’s what Twitter was meant for; this is the platonic ideal of a post. It’s looking bad for the Eagles.
They are not, of course, a team composed entirely of gold medal posters. Isaiah Pacheco has only had an account since 2021, and most of his tweets are retweets of Rutgers Football. Crocs ambassador Creed Humphrey’s most notable post is a screenshot of his 2020 Spotify wrapped, which reveals that he listened to enough Kings of Leon for them to be his No. 2 artist. Kadarius Toney has something of a lackluster profile, save for the time he made it clear he believes college athletes should get paid.
But the Chiefs have someone who picks up all the slack. It’s former reality TV star Travis Kelce, a man who created a Twitter account in 2009 and has been tweeting white-boy fire ever since. Something of a cinephile, Kelce has tweeted about several of his favorite movies which include Four Brothers, How High, The Book of Eli, Beverly Hills Ninja, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Get Him to the Greek, and Black Sheep.
At 20 years old he wrote one of the best tweets I’ve ever read:
He tweeted—
Oh no. Flag on the play! Flag on the play! As commissioner, I’m suspending Kelce from the Posters' Bowl for use of a slur. There are no other instances of Kelce using the f-word on his profile, and the fact that this one is misspelled makes me think that someone did a sweep before he got drafted and missed this one. Had I not found this, Kelce would probably have won MVP. It’s always a sad day when someone has to face consequences for his actions.
With Kelce out, it’s a much closer game. While I’m deciding, I would like to give honorable mention to the Bengals. Joe Burrow is an incredibly gifted poster, and had his team been in the mix this year I think they would have taken it.
Now, back to business. Even though I will probably be laughing at Brown’s “watching college football and thinking” tweet for the foreseeable future, it just isn’t enough to get the Eagles where they need to be. Despite losing Kelce, they still have Mahomes, Smith-Schuster, and Valdes-Scantling doing what needs to be done. I mean, just look at this:
Incredible stuff is going on in Kansas City, and they deserve the parade. (In this situation the “parade” is just 10,000 retweets and a repost on several different Barstool Instagram accounts.) Congrats to everyone on the team who isn’t Travis Kelce!
