It Would Appear That Matt Patricia Burner Account is Just Some Random Guy
A couple of days ago I wrote about @EddiePLionsFan the account that Tweeted a steady stream of positive messages of support for Detroit head coach Matt Patricia, paused for months once the regular season began, then started up again after the Lions fired him. With posts like this:
EddieP describes himself as a tech nerd. Patricia has a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. EddieP says he has a beautiful wife and three kids. Funny, so does Patricia. EddieP's name is EddieP. Patricia's is Matthew Edward P. So it wouldn't take Robert Langdon to piece those clues together and conclude you know who EddieP is. In fact, the whole world (at least that tiny subset of the world who cares about such thing) certainly did:
But hold yer horses there, Dan Brown.
Source - It all started as a lark one day in September, when Dylan Cardwell was scrolling the internet, reading stories about then-Houston Texans coach Bill O’Brien’s alleged burner Twitter account.
Cardwell was convinced O’Brien had a burner, or someone close to him was running the account, like what happened to former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Brian Colangelo in 2018. …
“I was a true believer,” Cardwell told the Free Press late Wednesday night. “I thought it was Bill O’Brien and Adam Gase behind (his alleged burner account), so I was curious to see how easily it would be for someone to make a burner account for someone famous. And as I found out, it’s pretty easy with a little planning.”
Cardwell figured he needed “a coach that was generally not liked” by his fan base “and one that I knew could potentially be fired in the season or after the season,” so his personal social experiment would not have to run indefinitely.
He settled on former Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia, did a little Wikipedia research, created an imposter account and bio that poorly disguised his fake identity — he claimed to be a married father of three, like Patricia, and a tech nerd, playing off Patricia’s engineering background, and used the handle, EddyPLionsFan; Patricia’s middle name is Edward — and went to work subtweeting Lions beat writers and fans in order to get noticed. …
Cardwell [is] a 20-year-old Los Angeles Rams fan who lives in West Jordan, Utah, and has no affiliation with Patricia or the Lions.
Cardwell said his intentions were only “to see if I could do it” and “get a few laughs,” and he decided to end the hoax when it garnered widespread attention and at least one death threat. Cardwell said one Twitter user replied to one of his as-Patricia messages saying, “if he ever sees me in person he will shoot me.”
On the one hand, I'm glad @EddiePLionsFan really isn't Matt Patricia, because I like the guy. On the other hand, I'd be lying if I said part me isn't disappointed. I'm talking about that part of me that resents people who are way smarter than me and are good enough at math and science that they had a degree from Rensselaer and designed submarines while my greatest achievement was a C- minus in Calculus II at a state school. It would've been the height comedy if a man with Patricia's intelligence thought he could pull off such a ham-handed ploy for support. The social media equivalent of that Far Side of the kid going to the School for the Gifted.
But on the other, other hand, I'm grateful to Dylan Cardwell. Without intending to, he taught us all a valuable lesson about the internet. It's fake. It's ridiculous. It's not to be taken seriously. Very little of it is real. And for all those reasons, it's to be celebrated and embraced as the most incredible creation in the history of mankind. Anyone who takes themselves seriously on the socials belongs in an institution. Anyone who would threaten to kill a 20-year-old Rams fan from Utah for pulling a prank that has absolutely zero actual victims belongs behind bars. And frankly, I'm not sure where a 20-year-old Rams fan from Utah belongs, but it's neither being a Rams fan or Utah. But that's Dylan's cross to bear. I don't judge. I just admire the success of the goof and the larger truth it points out how absurd Twitter is and how we all need to just dial it back to about 2 on the Seriousness Scale. File this away the next time a famous person gets accused of something simliar.
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P.S. I'm glad I didn't take the cheese on this. But I respect how well this kid set the trap.