Enraged Saints fans shame Buffalo Wild Wings into apologizing for harmless joke
An offseason of lawsuits, bitter complaining and NFL rule changes for the New Orleans Saints saw a sudden redux in Week 2 when the team’s rematch against the Los Angeles Rams featured another blown call.
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Unsurprisingly, Saints fans weren’t in a joking mood about their zealous reaction to the infamous 2019 NFC championship game, as one prominent restaurant chain learned.
Saints fans get very mad at Buffalo Wild Wings
As soon as the referees announced the Saints’ fumble-return touchdown had been blown dead despite a reversal in their favor, the narrative was back. The Saints had been screwed again.
An obvious, yet uncalled, pass interference penalty had cost the Saints a trip to the Super Bowl in the NFC championship game last season. What followed was a torrent of outrage reaching levels possibly never before seen in the NFL. The league was pushed enough to change its rules, lawsuits and petitions to replay the game were filed, death threats were sent to the offending Rams player and discourse over the matter reached Congress.
Now, a game featuring the same teams saw a pivotal call blown almost as badly in the same direction.
With that in mind, Buffalo Wild Wings fired off this tweet in response to the latest blown call. Funnily enough, the tweet is still up.
New Orleans fans already drawing up lawsuits.
— Buffalo Wild Wings (@BWWings) September 15, 2019
That seven-word tweet was apparently so callous and offensive that it attracted a fire hose of outrage from Saints fans, who complained enough that the Buffalo Wild Wings central office felt the need to apologize, per NOLA.com.
“We apologize for our tweet, which was not meant to offend Saints fans,” an email reportedly said. “We intended to point out another bad call in a fun way. In fact, our Director of Social Media is a die-hard Saints fan who attended the NFC Championship game earlier this year.”
According to the story, the owner of a New Orleans-area BWW franchise reported a dip in business Monday, while some fans vowed online to boycott the chain. Over a tweet. From a chicken restaurant.
This whole thing is extremely silly
Look, we could probably talk for hours about the emotional state of Saints fans amid all these bad breaks and everything they’ve done to make sure the world knows how much the sport of football has wronged them. However, stating in plain terms what is happening here shows how absolutely ridiculous this situation has become:
An NFL fanbase got extremely mad at a chicken wing franchise over a seven-word tweet mocking how some of their own filed federal lawsuits over a bad call in a football game. And it got so bad the chain apologized.
The tweet didn’t even mock the Saints over the bad call and loss, it was completely focused on how some Saints fans, again, literally made a federal case to demand that the NFC championship game be replayed in the week before the Super Bowl. It still seemed to cross a line.
Fun times we live in.
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