April Jules!

 The sports world wasted no time getting to pranking on this first day of April. From the moment many Americans woke up they were bombarded with tweet after tweet from well-respected sports pages claiming that their team had traded for/away a great player.

Obviously, this was a joke. Despite Cowboys’ cornerback Trevon Diggs tweeting out that he’s always wanted to play with his brother, there was never any traction behind this rumor and it just wouldn’t make sense for the Cowboys, who just traded away Amari Cooper for cap reasons, to trade for a different expensive receiver — albeit Diggs does have a lower base salary than Cooper did with the Cowboys.

The above was slightly more believable given Kyler Murray’s alleged discontent with the Cardinals’ front office earlier this offseason plus the fact that this is an account with over 20K followers, but the Murray contract situation in Arizona was resolved several weeks ago. If April 1 came in the middle of the Kyler saga, maybe this would’ve found more suckers. Still, the people who were fooled by this post were either heartbroken or exhilarated depending on what side of the fake trade their team was on. It toyed with their emotions, and then toyed back when they realized it wasn’t true.

However, no one played with NFL fans’ heartstrings quite like former New England Patriots’ wide receiver Julian Edelman.

The former Super Bowl MVP woke up today and chose violence, posting this very realistic looking screenshot on his Twitter with the caption: “On to the next chapter.” While Edelman did his best to make sure people knew this was a joke by posting “April Fools” in the corner of the post in tiny font, several people missed that text entirely. After all, who reads the fine print on anything nowadays? I’ve never read the Apple Terms & Conditions, and I know for a fact you haven’t either. Don’t lie to me!

Edelman’s incredible friendship with Bucs quarterback Tom Brady is a big reason so many people believed this post originally. While many might have looked at Edelman’s retirement as reason enough to doubt his post, Brady just unretired a few weeks ago. With tight end Rob Gronkowski still a free agent, it would make sense that Brady would want one of his best football buddies on his team, and while Edelman didn’t play in 2021, Gronk didn’t play in 2019 only to come back in 2020 and put up pretty solid numbers.

But alas, many Bucs and Patriots fans were saddened when they realized Edelman had played them for a fool. With so many former New England legends unretiring nowadays, it’s easy to get a jolt of excitement from anything, even something as unbelievable as Edelman’s tweet.

You got ‘em good Jules...well played.