ESPN's Adam Schefter and Field Yates did not actually break the news of Julian Edelman's pending PED suspension. The information was first shared on a Reddit Patriots message board, and the source was mocked.
He is almost certainly having the last laugh now.
On Wednesday, a user by the name of "Redditlover1981" started a thread titled, "Rumor: Edelman potentially getting suspended for 4 games for PED's." Unsurprisingly, other users on the Pats fan forum didn't take kindly to the revelation.
Some random dude leaked the Edelman suspension rumor on the Pats subreddit last night and got absolutely eviscerated for it ------ pic.twitter.com/q0SuZfsKjw
— Evan Hill (@EvanonHB) June 7, 2018"Redditlover1981," to his credit, handled the knee-jerk criticism with aplomb. "You're about to feel really stupid tomorrow when this is national news but okay :)," he wrote. (The smiley face is a real nice touch. It's perfectly pompous, and tends to infuriate those who foam at the mouth over negative Patriots stories. I have done it a couple of times myself.)
While it's possible this random Reddit poster made up the story and got lucky, it would been an incredible coincidence. The likelihood of that seems slim.
ProFootballTalk theorizes "Redditlover1981" is an ESPN employee who knew Schefter and Yates were working on the story. Some of his previous posts on the message board include defenses of Seth Wickersham's reporting on the apparent rift between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
Whatever the case, "Redditlover1981" nailed the story completely. On Thursday night, he teased there is more to come. "I've actually been sitting on some bigger patriots news for the past few days, still trying to verify that it's 100% true before putting it out there," he wrote.
Maybe it's Belichick posting under a pseudonym.
