Jon Rothstein and the art of the hilariously timed tweet

The famed college basketball insider has a habit of breaking insignificant news as major world events are unfolding. Let's take a look at it

Before we get going, a quick note…

I want to take some steps that occasionally make this feel more like a newsletter and community rather than someone just dumping a 2,500-word feature in your inbox a couple of times a week. 

One of those things is offering updates on stories that we’ve previously done here. Sometimes, I’ll dedicate the newsletter to a team/program on some kind of inspired run without ever following up on it. For some reading this, you keep up with these matters closely and are aware of what has happened, but that’s not true for everyone, especially if the piece looks at a smaller school from the lower levels of the college sports universe.

In the most recent newsletter, I wrote about Birmingham-Southern baseball’s run to the Division III College World Series, which began the same day the college was set to close. After dropping their first game, the Panthers rallied from a three-run deficit in the eighth inning and got a walk-off two-run homer from Jackson Webster in the bottom of the ninth. The following day, however, they relinquished a late five-run lead to Wisconsin-Whitewater and ultimately lost on a walk-off solo home run in the ninth.

Birmingham-Southern ended its final season 33-16.

Now, on to today’s newsletter…

Every now and then, Twitter has a moment, a time when news of some great importance or resonance breaks and people flock to the website, whether it’s to unleash their own thoughts or, more often than not, bask in the broader, frenzied conversation around some kind of event unfolding in real time.

In slightly simpler times, these memorable instances made what’s otherwise an online hellscape something more palatable and enjoyable. Nowadays, when about 68% of the content seems like it’s showing off certain bodily orifices, it’s a wistful reminder of how something that was once great is now a significantly diminished version of it, even as so many of us remain hopelessly addicted to it.

Last week, we got one of those days.

On May 30, Donald Trump’s hush money trial came to an eventful conclusion, with the former president convicted on 34 felony counts. Reaction to it unfolded in waves. First, there was the initial news. Next came the immediate reactions, the shock, astonishment and, depending on your politics, glee or revulsion. Finally, there were the jokes, the reason why so many of us check Twitter as an impulse rather than do something more constructive with our time. The metaphorical dust eventually settled – probably around the time everyone was doing the same bit comparing Trump’s 0 for 34 success rate to their favorite struggling athlete or team – but before it did, it was glorious.

Among the many faces and voices embedded in that digital chaos was Jon Rothstein.

For anyone who follows college basketball even somewhat closely, Rothstein is an inescapable figure, an insider and commentator who talks and tweets about the sport as relentlessly as anyone and often does so with a series of catchphrases that you eventually understand through sheer exposure to them. How deep is his commitment to the sport? He tweeted in March that his wife had to take their six-month-old child with her on a west coast road trip so that he could remain in New York to watch UConn and St. John’s play in the Big East Tournament.

(This has to be one of those instances in which he’s exaggerating. Had it actually happened that way – and speaking as someone who has flown three times with a baby, and always with my wife – there’s zero chance he’s still married. If he’s lucky, he might be able to see his kid one weekend a month).

While Twitter feeds everywhere were overwhelmed with coverage of the Trump verdict, Rothstein’s 384,800 followers were treated to even more seismic news than the presumed presidential nominee of a major political party officially becoming a convicted felon. They got a college basketball scheduling update.

You see, right as Trump heard the jury foreperson read off each of the 34 guilties, some unnamed individual – most likely, an assistant coach or off-court administrator – reached out to Rothstein with a nugget.

Source: Stanford will host Merrimack on December 17th as part of its 2024-25 non-conference schedule.

Kyle Smith against Joey Gallo.

A chess match awaits in Palo Alto

There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. Rothstein has built a large online following by breaking college basketball news for more than a decade and in this instance, he had a scoop and went with it. It’s not like he has control over when a jury finishes deliberations and announces a verdict.

Having said that, the timing is undeniably odd. Rothstein’s tweet, which was posted at 5:10 p.m. ET, came within five minutes of the decision on the final of the 34 counts being read. It’s quite possible he was told the news and went on his phone or computer to tweet it without knowing the verdict had just been handed down, but it’s just as implausible that he logged on to Twitter and saw nothing about it. That’s not to say he shouldn’t have proceeded, but maybe he could have held off for a few minutes. It’s not exactly the piece of hotly pursued news in which waiting even 10 seconds might cost you a precious scoop.

Among a large slice of fans, Rothstein is seen as a college basketball robot, someone whose online identity – and, ostensibly, his larger existence – is built entirely around college basketball, as well as the occasional movie or New York Italian restaurant. He doesn’t interact with a world outside of college basketball because, to him, there isn’t one.

There’s a piece of evidence that backs up the intentional nature of this – he’s got a history of these kinds of tweets.

I had scattered memories of scrolling Twitter during some kind of weighty historical moment and coming across a random Rothstein post about some piece of college basketball minutiae. After doing a little research this week and seeing what Rothstein tweeted on certain days of historical significance over the past dozen years, I found out there’s a little more to it. Rothstein’s curiously and hilariously timed tweets go beyond a few isolated instances.

This isn’t some investigative endeavor meant to expose anything unseemly. It’s just someone with an odd fascination with Rothstein who finds his catalog of off-topic tweets to be genuinely funny, like a man seeing a comet hurtling towards Earth and responding only by checking his phone, seeing UNC Greensboro got a commitment from a 6-foot-4 combo guard and letting the doomed world around him know.

There aren’t a ton of parameters on this. Rothstein’s been on Twitter since Oct. 2009, but for at least a couple of years, he was a relatively anonymous figure with a small audience. I began with world events from 2011, the year I remember him regularly breaking news, back when I was in college and getting started covering college basketball. The first event I searched – the day Osama bin Laden was killed – didn’t turn up any results, sadly.

I made an effort to see what time a particular event happened and what he tweeted in the hours after it. It doesn’t make much sense to post a tweet from the morning of Election Day when all the action is happening at night.

Lastly, I chose not to include a lot of potential inclusions that occurred between November and March, sometimes even into April. This man is a college basketball sicko who’s constantly watching the sport and talking about it. It’s his job and, as any journalist can attest, you have to be committed to your work even as the world around you seems chaotic with news rapidly unfolding in real time. I can still remember covering a Pitt-Syracuse basketball game in the middle of the Capitol insurrection in 2021. A basketball game in a nearly empty Carrier Dome couldn’t have felt more insignificant, but I had a job to do that day, so I did it.

Entries are presented here in chronological order.

The Auburn-Alabama Kick Six (November 2013)

A late November Penn State-Ole Miss game waits for no one. Not even one of the most iconic plays in college football history.

Audio of Donald Sterling making racist comments leaks (April 2014)

TMZ’s story with the infamous audio clip of Sterling chiding his mistress for sitting courtside with Black people at Los Angeles Clippers games posted at 1 a.m. ET. He spent the following morning housing Pamela’s hotcakes, which, as a Pittsburgh resident of 10 years, I can fully endorse as a morning well spent. Though six of them, along with six eggs, is a deranged amount of food.

Donald Trump announces his 2016 presidential run (June 2015)

Trump’s infamous-though-ultimately-successful campaign launch came right as Geno Thorpe was deciding where he would transfer to after two years at Penn State. I briefly covered Thorpe’s high school career in the Pittsburgh area and I have to say, the man was ahead of his time, with three schools in five years before immediate eligibility was a thing. He walked so all these munchkins in the transfer portal today could run.

Various Super Bowls

Rothstein would typically at least acknowledge the existence of the game, though primarily as a way to shower praise on his friend’s annual Super Bowl party. There were instances, though, when college basketball forced America’s secular holiday to take a proverbial backseat.

Election Night 2016 (Nov. 2016)

If you want to pinpoint a moment in which Rothstein’s wonderfully oblivious tweets became canon, this was it.

As the most surreal election cycle in American history reached its shocking end and the country worked to internalize that the former host of “The Celebrity Apprentice” was about to become the leader of the free world, Rothstein was plugging away. It’s hard to poke fun at him for the Josh Reaves tweet – that’s just an obvious news dump from the folks at Penn State – but the Corinthian Ramsey one is still, nearly eight years later, the pinnacle of the genre.

Interestingly enough, Ramsey never went on to play for Nicholls State, instead ending up at Tarleton State in Texas, which was still a Division II school at the time. He played two seasons there, averaging 18.6 points per game as a junior in 2017-18 and 11.6 points per game as a senior in 2018-19.

Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (May 2018)

I cut him some slack on this one. He was right to ignore it.

Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Sept. 2018)

Green went on to have a solid college career that, given everything that has transpired since this tweet was published, miraculously just ended. He played two years at Bryant and two more at Robert Morris before spending his final season at James Madison, where he averaged 7.3 points per game and came off the bench for 11 points and three assists in the Dukes’ NCAA Tournament upset of Wisconsin.

Notre-Dame fire (April 2019)

Notre-Dame the medieval Catholic cathedral in Paris, not the Gipper school in northern Indiana.

Bryant went on to win this game 69-61, with our old pal Mike Green scoring 11 points off the bench for the Bulldogs.

Jeffrey Epstein found dead (Aug. 2019)

The morning Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier, died in federal jail as the result of an apparent suicide, Rothstein posted about an East Carolina team that went on to go 11-20 overall and 5-13 in the American Athletic Conference.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies (Sept. 2020)

I guess this one might have been worthwhile to post, too. Though if you want a peek at why the Pac-12 floundered under Larry Scott, the phrase “the Pac-12 CEO Group” isn’t a bad place to start.

Election Night 2020 (Nov. 2020)

Frankly, this was a perfect storm. If there’s one beat in the college basketball universe Rothstein owns, it’s non-conference scheduling, to the point where he has a virtual monopoly over the subject (speaking as a former beat writer who would often try to get coaches and various staff members to leak the matchups to me).

The 2020 college basketball season didn’t begin until late November, rather than early November, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which also made scheduling a hastily planned venture, with games often not inked until weeks or even days before they were set to take place. So Rothstein’s typical non-conference scheduling tweets, which dominate his feed in April, May and June, now happened to be coming during arguably the most high-stakes election in the country’s history.

And my goodness, did he meet the moment.

Roe v Wade overturned (June 2022)

I still think the most disappointing aspect of this tweet is folks in the quote-tweets and replies using it to argue with the early odds or stick out their chest because their team was highly placed rather than admiring the artist at work.

Mar-a-Lago raided by the FBI (Aug. 2022)

Washington spent one season at Loyola before moving on to Iona, where he’s the director of player development.

Queen Elizabeth’s death (Sept. 2022)

Harvey averaged 2.2 points per game in what would be his only season at UC Santa Barbara. It was not significant Big West news. 

Though, again, we fought a war almost 250 years ago to avoid having to care about this kind of stuff. And UCSB went on to win the Big West and play in the 2023 NCAA Tournament, which is more than Queen Elizabeth ever accomplished.

Damar Hamlin collapses during Monday Night Football (Jan. 2023)

This is where I make an exception to in-season tweets. He’s reacting to Rutgers’ 65-64 win against Purdue, a thrilling contest in which Cam Spencer drained a game-winning 3-pointer with 14 seconds left to hand the Boilermakers their first loss of the season. If Rothstein, the college basketball content machine he is, isn’t at least acknowledging what happened, he isn’t properly doing his job.

But you might want to sideline the catchphrases for a night while most of the country thinks they just witnessed an NFL player die on the field on national television. This may have been the night I discovered Rothstein doesn’t regularly check his mentions because, whew buddy, there were enough people in there telling him to stop.

Events he didn’t tweet during

Rothstein did not send any kind of tweet in the immediate aftermath of the following news stories:

• The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

• The George Zimmerman acquittal

• Robin Williams’ suicide

• The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville

• Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry

In each case, it’s probably for the best.

News events in which he offered condolences

Lest his passion for college basketball be misconstrued as insensitivity or outright heartlessness, Rothstein acknowledged the following events with a tweet offering thoughts, prayers or some other comforting message:

• The Boston Marathon bombing

• Pulse nightclub shooting

• 2017 Las Vegas shooting

• Tom Petty dying

• Shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue

• Muhammad Ali dying

*****

Outside of the understandable boundaries Rothstein set for more tragic occurrences, you may have noticed a pattern over this odyssey we just took together. Rothstein’s interestingly timed tweets have become much more common in recent years, as his following has grown larger and his reputation has been cemented.

All of this leads me to believe it’s a bit, with his latest scheduling tweet pushing me farther in that direction. He is cognizant of the comings and goings in the broader world around him and finds some humor in saving a bit of an evergreen tweet for moments when everyone else is fixated on something other than college basketball. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he was told about that Stanford-Merrimack matchup hours, days or even weeks earlier, but waited to unleash it at the perfect time he did.

As much as I wish he were, Rothstein is not a robot constructed to wax poetic about college basketball. I’ve spoken with him on the phone for several stories before, usually to get a national perspective on whatever was going on at Pitt at the time. He even offered up a Brooklyn restaurant recommendation for the ACC Tournament one year that I, unfortunately, never followed through on. In our brief interactions, I found him to be quite friendly, generous with his time and, from every indication I got, a flesh-and-blood human.

While he’s not carefully programmed to zig in the American news landscape while others zag, and while it’s almost certainly an intentional and conscious act on his part, that doesn’t make it any less funny. If anything, it might make him a genius.

(Photos: Getty Images, a shit-load of screenshots)