The Green Bay Packers fired associate head coach Winston Moss on Tuesday just hours after tweeting what characteristics he thought would make for the ideal candidate to be the new coach of the team.
The decision to let Moss go reportedly came directly from interim head coach Joe Philbin.
While Moss’s tweet appears to imply that his earlier commentary was the reason he was fired, those reporting on the subject tried to squash that notion. ESPN’s Jason Wilde said, “To be clear, Moss wasn’t fired over the Tweet” while Rob Demovsky (also ESPN) said these decisions are “not uncommon when a head coaching change is made.” The Packers’ official statement makes no reference to the tweet either.
Objectively, it’s no surprise that Moss was let go considering how closely connected he was to the recently fired Mike McCarthy—who made Moss an associate head coach in 2007. A direct connection between the firing and the tweet will probably never be officially made, but it’s not something that can be dismissed as a possibility. Plus, a coach getting shitcanned because he was too online is exactly the type of story that makes more sense in 2018 than any other period in human history, so there has to be some truth to it.