Like many of you, I was rocked by the news that Cincinnati Bengals star receiver Ja'Marr Chase would be out for the next month or more due to a hip injury. You may already be worrying about whether or not he'll be available or playing like his old self for the fantasy postseason. It's a bit early for this kind of speculation, but unless you're blessed with a plethora of top receivers, you've got to stick with Chase at that critical time of the season as soon as he returns to the starting lineup.
However, would you believe that a million people, including myself, had some early heads-up about Chase's injury? And if you were a member of a certain online group, you could have known ahead of most of the world? Well, if you are a diehard subscriber to r/fantasyfootball on Reddit, you might have caught wind of a since-deleted, typo-filled rumor posted by a user drmrpaul5, which went as follows:
Okay, here I go with my tinfoil hat.
My friend has a friend who works at an orthopedic hospital in Cincinnati and said that Ja’Marr Chase was in there today. He’s out for the reason of the season with an injury. I’m exactly sure what the injury is at this point, I’m waiting to hear back from my friend. Obviously nothing has been reported yet, but the team is expected to break the news later today.
Do what you want with this information, and god speed Ja’Marr.
The post, which went online at 12:40 p.m. ET o Thursday, was up nearly four hours before the first tweet confirming the news by Malik Wright at 4:20 p.m. ET and later confirmed by many national outlets like Adam Schefter at 4:36 p.m. ET.
You won't often find news broken on r/fantasyfootball. But it is an unparalleled aggregate of fantasy news with involved, opinionated fantasy managers. There are, in fact, 1,242,364 members of the subreddit, making it one of the largest sports subreddits on the site. It receives over 200 posts and 10,000 comments per day, making it one of the most active subreddits on the site.
For those not in the know, you may be asking, What is Reddit, exactly? Well, Reddit is a site made up of tens of thousands of communities, called subreddits. Each subreddit is an interest--everything under the sun, really. Some of the most popular subreddits are r/gaming, dedicated to video games, or r/music, which is of course all about music. There's r/politics, r/news, r/books, r/art, r/space, r/sports, r/history and even a little subreddit for football card collectors, r/footballcards, which is moderated by me u/ffwriter, as I go by on Reddit.. There's a subreddit for just about everything. And r/fantasyfootball is well worth your time if you're looking for like-minded, big-brained fantasy fans.
