Update (Dec. 3, 1:22 PM): No.
It’s of little question that Matt Patricia is a fraudulent, gaseous windbag (and allegedly a rapist!). He’s just another trinket to fall off the Belichick Anti-Giving Tree of coaches, which has swirled teams down the drain of death for a decade-plus. He took a playoff-caliber team under Jim Caldwell that had won nine games or more three of the previous four seasons and turned them into a directionless pile of twisted metal and unidentifiable goo. His last act was to oversee the Lions getting mauled by the equally confused Texans on Thanksgiving.
But is he also a petulant, reactionary whiner on Twitter? He just might be.
At first glance, the Twitter user @EddyPLionsFan doesn’t appear to be any more than your usual mouthy football fan. But any deeper perusal and things get awfully interesting. One, the feed hasn’t tweeted anything except for two days back in September, and then he had the Romeo-fingers awfully busy yesterday in the wake of Patricia’s firing.
The list of follows is only composed of Lions players, blogs, writers, various national football writers, NFL feeds, and depressingly, unsurprisingly BarfStool. Nothing too out of the ordinary there, though if Patricia were to have the rabbit ears up, these would be the people he would follow. Creepily, the Lions cheerleaders are another follow.
But as a few internet sleuths have pointed out, the dots are there to be connected. First of all, Patricia’s middle name just happens to be Edward:
Secondly, EddyPLionsFan says he’s married with three kids. Curious…
It’s always the alleged sex criminals who have to boast about their family credentials up front, isn’t it?
Perhaps the most indicting aspect is just how vociferous this particular Twitter bullhorn is in defending Patricia, whose run as Lions coach by any logical measure was 50-car pileup.
Some samples:
But the real kicker here is the swipe at Matthew Stafford:
Now the Lions have a lot of problems, and the debate over what Matthew Stafford actually is has been raging for years. The idea he’s a locker room cancer has rarely ever been whispered throughout his career in Detroit. But nothing has ever been Patricia’s fault, and he’s going to find anyone within reaching distance to chuck under that bus.
With all this time on his hands now, you’d think Patricia would have better things to do than to monitor what’s being said about him and pick internet fights with anyone who passes his line of sight. But then again, he didn’t get this way by being an expert user of his time, did he?