It’s NBA Finals time, which means it’s time for (1) the Cavs and the Warriors to play basketball, because of course, and (2) for friendly, totally reasonable, Twitter wagers.
Enter: Browns safety Damarious Randall.
Not to be outdone, retired Browns offensive lineman (and future Hall of Famer) Joe Thomas made a similar promise hinging on a Warriors win:
Get in on this action now! Retweet both of these and you’re guaranteed at least one team’s jersey. I’m sure both Randall and Thomas are good for this, right?
Just for fun, let’s do the math. Randall’s post is currently sitting at more than 763,000 retweets. Even if he’s getting a discount rate for buying jerseys in bulk, this will be a hard order to fulfill if the Cavs win. A conservative estimate of $10 per jersey puts his bill at more than $7.6 million. As his tweet keeps climbing in RTs, that number will likely surpass the four-year, $7.9 million contract he signed in 2015. Randall said there is a 100 percent chance he’ll deliver, but maybe he should start rooting for Golden State in the hopes that he doesn’t have to.
Thomas is at fewer retweets—more than 90,000, and climbing—but his claim is even bigger. He first promised game-worn Stephen Curry jerseys to everyone who hit the RT button, but backpedaled to a signed, game-worn NBA jersey from any player. There are 1,230 regular-season games in an NBA season, and each team plays about 10 guys per game. Now, it is true that some players will change jerseys at halftime just to freshen up a bit, so let’s assume that every player does that in every single game. (I’m just trying to give Thomas the benefit of the doubt here.) That’s a total of 49,200 jerseys per season. If the Warriors win the Finals, he’ll need to hunt down at least two seasons worth of game-worn NBA jerseys and get every single one of them signed. At least he didn’t specify who has to sign them.
OK, so maybe retweeting both of these tweets isn’t a surefire way to score an NBA jersey. This stunt serves only as good publicity for both guys … at least until one is supposed to pay up. It’s virtually impossible for athletes to make good on these promises, so mashing that RT button is the 21st-century version of forwarding that Guinness Book of World Records chain mail letter your cousin sent you in the ’90s.
But please retweet this article. Everyone who does will get a free Binge Mode T-shirt signed by Mallory Rubin. I promise.
