Bradford Staying at OU Causes a Curious Cover-Up at National Football Post

Before the BCS championship game, the football Web site National Football Post declared -- via sources close to NFP -- that Sam Bradford was as good as gone to the NFL, barring injury, after the Sooners' game against Florida.

This story was blast e-mailed out to, presumably, many people (I got it twice from their PR firm, Gravitas). I wrote about it on FanHouse, MJD discussed it on Yahoo!, it was mentioned as a jinx at Deadspin, and Matt Hinton linked it up three times, to name a few of the higher profile places it was mentioned. And that's just for starters, in terms of pub that NFP pulled from the story.

At the time, I also made somewhat of a snarky analogy to Stephen Curry starting against Duke, because the likelihood of Bradford leaving seemed to obvious to ignore. But then he stayed. And suddenly, NFP's post about Bradford bouncing completely disappeared, leaving only what looks to be a 404 type of page error.

Look, I say wrong things too. Not factually inaccurate mind you, but occasionally, I have opinions that end up being incorrect (the Panthers whipping the Cardinals, for one). And when that happens, I'm willing to accept the consequences of being wrong; that's part of writing about anything with an uncertain outcome.

However, NFP used a "source" to report something that they were claiming as a scoop and a fact, not as a prediction. That's an entirely different ballgame.

And assuming that NFP didn't have a server issue or accidentally remove the content, this seems like a pretty odd way to handle "sources" being inaccurate; if the deletion was intentional, it's a poor journalistic choice and a horrible misuse of the easily editable characteristics of our new medium for covering athletics.