Someone hacked the NFL's Twitter account Tuesday morning and posted: "We regret to inform our fans that our commissioner, Roger Goodell, has passed away. He was 57. #RIP."
It caused enough of a buzz that Brian McCarthy, the head of public relations for the NFL, tweeted:
At noon, about a half-hour after McCarthy's Tweet has been posted a Google search of "Roger Goodell dead tweet" yielded this:
That wasn't the only rough spot for Goodell on the web Tuesday. He appeared on Monday at a golf tournament sponsored by former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly in upstate New York, where he had his photo taken with a New England Patriots fan.
We're going to spare you the photo because the fan has his right arm around Goodell -- and is giving him a middle-finger salute with his left hand.
The fan, Jim Podanoffsky, found that he'd become a web sensation because of the photo and expressed his regrets to the New York Post.
"It was a joke … a spur-of-the-moment thing," he said.
Podanoffsky said he wasn't making a statement on behalf of Patriots fans about Goodell's handling of the Deflategate case, in which quarterback Tom Brady's four-game NFL suspension is currently being appealed. He told the Post: "I posted a comment [on Facebook] before any of this went out of hand about what a nice guy he was. Just a real down-to-earth guy, not at all what I expected."
