How one anonymous account fooled sports media: a conversation with Matt from Akron

DNHQ speaks with the creator of "BS Sports" about the game, grief, satire, and the strange intersection between technology and belief.

I stumbled across BallSack Sports back in 2022 the way most people did: mid-scroll, half-paying attention, fully convinced I’d just seen a real piece of NBA news. What fascinated me wasn’t that I got fooled. It was how cleanly it happened. How quickly my brain accepted it. How easily the account moved from “this is hilarious” to “wait… hold on.”

This wasn’t just trolling. It was precision.

At one point, BallSack Sports was responsible for some of the most convincing misinformation in the sports internet ecosystem. Not parody obvious but the kind that looked, sounded, and moved exactly like real reporting. One fake report in particular made the leap from Twitter to television, when Stephen A. Smith cited it on First Take in conversation with Magic Johnson, treating it as legitimate insider information. The clip circulated. The discussion continued. Authority was assumed. Then Kevin Durant watched it unfold and responded in real time: “Damn Steve. Got ya ass.”

In that moment, the entire sports media pipeline was exposed. A fake tweet had traveled, unchecked, through the same channels as real reporting. Not because people were stupid, but because the mechanics of credibility are fragile once momentum takes over. What’s easy to miss is what came next.

Surprisingly to me, rather than doubling down it stopped to explain itself. A plainspoken breakdown of how misinformation works. It referenced how graphics manufacture authority and how quotes without sources should raise alarms. The account that had just embarrassed the system turned around and held up a mirror.

This person cared about more than just being popular. Rare.

That tension between chaos and conscience, satire and responsibility, is what made me want to talk to the person behind it. Not about the tweets themselves, but about the mind capable of building something so effective, then turning around and warning people how it was done. At its peak, BallSack Sports didn’t just fool fans. It pierced the membrane between Twitter and television, showing up in places it had no business being. It morphed into a stress test and live-fire drill for the way we consume information, argue online, and outsource credibility to vibes, logos, and repetition.

Fast forward to late December 2025, where I was feeling a bit subdued and wistful after family time, remembering the passing of my grandfather, and how half of my year was spent at home dealing with an ailing body. As I scrolled, I saw Ballsack Sports was in their own head too:

Wait what? That was poignant and vulnerable. I clicked his account and scrolled through, catching a tweet he had posted on December 27th about seeing his father in the hospital, eating Taco Bell with his mom, and watching the struggles of the people near him. I felt the pain oozing through the screen, and felt like this is a person that I’d want to share a good word with.

I reached out and he was gracious to connect. He let me know that his father had passed away; absolutely devastating news. He said his family was grieving but finding joy and stability in each other.

We chatted on the phone for almost an hour sharing laughs, basketball insights, our love for our cities and our communities, and an insider’s view on getting famous on the internet. Above all we resonated on how sports and technology create connections and memories that pass through generations.

So before the virality.
Before the receipts.
Before Stephen A. Smith making a damn fool of himself on live TV.

This conversation starts somewhere quieter with a dude from Akron named Matt.

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DANIEL:
First question I’m gonna ask you: if someone knew you in eighth grade, Matt from Akron, what would they say about you?

MATT:
Oh, quiet. I was so quiet. So quiet in school growing up. I remember eighth grade particularly well. It’s actually funny that you said eighth grade, because I was journaling about sports every single morning in English class, and my teacher would show my mom my journaling. I guess my teacher really liked my writing.

But I was just really reserved, really to myself, and focused on academics honestly. I had stopped playing sports and just minded my own business. I’d go to school, do my homework, play Call of Duty, and watch sports. I lived for Saturdays, especially college football. I liked the NBA, but I was mainly into college football.

DANIEL:
Okay. And who was your team?

MATT:
My team? Yeah. Oh, Ohio State. Ohio State football.

DANIEL:
THE Ohio State University!

MATT:
Yep! The first game I remember watching with my dad was the 2003 Fiesta Bowl with Ohio State versus Miami. Yep. Yep. I was, I think I was like five years old. I still remember that day vividly. I was in preschool.

My mom picked me up and took me to the Dollar Tree, where I got this foam football. When we got home, I was tossing it to myself in the living room, and then I wandered into the sunroom where my dad had the pregame on, this big boxy TV from the early 2000s sitting in the corner.

I’m looking at the screen and I see Miami’s on a 34-game win streak, and I see that we’re 13-2. I know we’re huge underdogs. I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude yet because I was still new to Ohio State football, but I could sense that my dad was excited for this game.

My dad was born in ’61. He was only seven when Ohio State won in 1968, but that was through the polls. This was different. This was the first real championship game, especially for him. I fell asleep probably somewhere in the third or fourth quarter, and my mom wanted to take me upstairs, but my dad said nope. He said, “I’m keeping him here. He’s my good luck charm.”

They pull it out in double overtime. I wake up in the morning and my dad has it recorded, with my siblings gathered in the living room, and he’s just so excited, so happy that the Buckeyes won.

Ever since then, that just forged our bond together. Saturdays with my dad meant mowing the grass and pulling the weeds in the morning, then sitting down for noon kickoff. That was the start of everything. Everything came full circle years later when we actually got to watch the Ohio State–Miami game again on New Year’s Eve before he passed away. And I really appreciate that moment together.

DANIEL:
Wow, man. Whew. We can cut it right now; that’s the interview right there. DAMN, that was amazing. Thank you for sharing that dude. Have you taken sports journalism? Have you been writing stuff?

MATT:
No. I used to, like seventh and eighth grade, say I wanted to write for ESPN one day. I wanted to travel the country, go to games, and write about the games, because my dad had me subscribed to ESPN Magazine and Sports Illustrated, and I loved the storytelling and the depth of those stories. It was something I was really passionate about.

DANIEL:
Yeah man, I can tell. When you’re telling the story, it’s super vivid. You have a gift for it for sure. Interesting you say that. Before this whole BallSack Sports thing existed, what were you trying to express or escape when you first started creating that account?

MATT:
Oh, that’s a good question. I feel like I reconnected with sports in my late teens and early twenties, because I had fallen into a pretty deep depression midway through my junior year of high school.

Dealing with a lot. I lost my scholarship coming out of high school and was in a pretty rough place around 2017, and for me the way out was just shooting a basketball in my driveway or going to my friend’s house and playing three on three. I was really just looking for little things to get up for each day.

DANIEL:
Wait, hey, can I pause you there? Are you a Cavaliers fan?

MATT:
Oh yeah, I’m a Cavs fan.

DANIEL:
Oh my goodness, here we go. I walked into a Cavaliers trap. This man is a mastermind! Okay, okay let’s rewind. When you were out there hooping, you were obviously watching all the LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love domination. Do you think y’all were a super team? Because the rest of the East certainly did.

MATT:
For me, I don’t really have a specific criteria, but I think those teams were very special. I’ve told my friends before that I think the 2017 Cavs were the best Cavs team I’ve ever seen, and that offense was absolutely insane.

DANIEL:
It was like a cobra. Anything you did against them was the wrong move.

MATT: But I personally think we ran into what I believe was the greatest team of all time, the 2017 Warriors. Steph, Klay, Dray, and KD. I think that was the greatest team I’ve ever seen, and I’ve got to give you guys a lot of credit for how you handled the 2017 Cavs, because we had a lot of firepower, but you had that too, and you had the defense.

DANIEL:
Yeah. That was the most anticipated Finals. You have to understand something bro: growing up as a Warriors fan, dude, we sucked most of my life, but I was like, that’s my team. I don’t care. It’s like having an uncle who sucks, but whatever. I would still love him.

But when they finally got good, there was hella bandwagon fans and hella haters. All that stuff. And when that first championship happened in 2015 we felt that LeBron and the whole league were saying it really didn’t count, and that really hurt our feelings.

That’s why we went 73-9. We were upset. And when we lost, there were a lot of things you could point to, a lot of things, and I’m not gonna rehash all of that, but I will say one thing you can circle: Harrison Barnes.

MATT:
Yeah, him missing open jump shots. Oh yeah. That was a big thing. All the Cavs fans were so grateful for him. We’d joke about it all the time, like every time someone missed a shot in the backyard and bricked we’d say, “oh, Harrison Barnes.” Everyone here knows it.

DANIEL:
Thank you for saying that. The people must know. So with all of that in the background, as you’re coming out of this depression, what led you to actually make the account?

MATT:
Just staying connected to people. I was trying to get out more into the world, even if it was just going out to Taco Bell, getting a Diet Coke, sitting down and scrolling Twitter, trying to stay connected, because for at least a year or two there I was alone a lot, sleeping most of the day and trying to find myself.

I also started getting back to the gym. I have social anxiety, so I really had to put myself in places where I wasn’t comfortable just to grow a little bit each day.

DANIEL:
So when you created the account, was it something where you were targeting a specific audience? Was it like, these guys on Twitter aren’t into this so I’m gonna get in that sphere, or was it more like me and my homies are gonna laugh at this? Who did you hope would see it, get a chuckle, or repost it and be wrong?

MATT:
I didn’t really know what the target audience was gonna look like at first, but learning basketball Twitter for a few years, you start to realize how the whole cycle works, how people react, and what’s popular. Do you know Barry McCockner?

DANIEL:
Yeah.

MATT:
He was fooling everybody in the late 2010s, and this was pre blue checkmark. He’d change the profile pic, and even though it was obviously fake, he’d still fool so many people. So seeing that, I thought, okay, I’m gonna give that a shot too, and I’m gonna do it under something so obscenely obvious as BallSack Sports. It’s fake, guys.

DANIEL:
GENIUS, by the way.

MATT:
It’s a play on BS, and you make it look a little bit legitimate. I made a fake Kyrie quote during the vaccine controversy. I had about 30 followers, and within 30 minutes it had 400 likes, then it jumped to 3,000.

That was one of those moments where I was like, wow. I always had the intuition that people believe everything they see on the internet, but right then I was like, okay, yeah, this is actually a problem.

Then I made a fake Daryl Morey trade that was going to upset one of the fan bases, but it was also tied to a brewing rumor, so there was some plausibility to it, and it got a lot of traction. Next thing I know, Daryl Morey is on a Philly radio show imploring people to not take BallSack Sports seriously.

DANIEL:
WHOA! Okay. At that moment, what hits your nervous system? How are you feeling?

MATT:
I remember that day really clearly. I was at McDonald’s with my mom and dad, and a friend tagged me in the radio clip. I showed my parents and just thought, wow, this is crazy. I’m just chilling here at McDonald’s and this stuff is hitting Daryl Morey.

DANIEL:
Wow! That is hard to fathom. That is the funniest stuff I’ve ever heard in my life.

So now that you’ve actually accomplished it, there are so many people out here trying to get internet attention, and as someone who’s received his fair share of it, I had to deal with the fact that it could all be fake. Like I don’t REALLY know if there are human beings at the other end of this message that are responding to me, what if it’s all bots??

So there’s a fair share of imposter syndrome to navigate sometimes. At what point did the account stop feeling like something you were doing and start feeling like something you were carrying? Did it ever start to feel like a responsibility?

MATT:
Yeah. That’s something I really struggled with. As the account got bigger, it was amusing and crazy to see it blow up, but growing up wanting to be a sports writer, you have a certain care for athletes.

I never wanted to put something out there that actually hurt someone or put an athlete in a position where they had to respond publicly and say, hey, can you cut that out. So I felt a responsibility not to go too far.

It got to a point where I’d put out Dame quotes and even highlight the print saying this is not real, and I tried really hard to get people to understand not to believe everything on the internet.

No matter what I did, people still fell for it, and it ended up on Fox News or ESPN. The empathetic side of me thought, okay, this is a legit problem, and it can be scary to think about what would happen if someone more malicious had this platform.

DANIEL:
When millions of people are reacting seriously to something you know isn’t real, how does that change the way reality feels to you?

MATT:
It made me more committed to balance. I love the humor aspect of the account, but I also want to raise awareness for media literacy, and I really try to keep that balance.

I’ve always been vocal about issues I feel strongly about, even with the account, and I want to try to use the platform for better purposes, to uplift other creators or speak on something important.

DANIEL:
You’re the architect of something that literally exposed how people consume information. When I first saw BallSack Sports popping up, I thought it was hilarious, but then people I knew were retweeting it seriously because your content was just too good. The ideas were too juicy. People had to share it.

That’s rare. Creating ideas people instinctually connect to and want to spread takes real skill. You have a gift.

So when you talked about responsibility, it made me think about Peter Parker mode you know? “With great power comes great responsibility.” After your father passed, did any of this feel more hollow or less important?

MATT:
Honestly, I’ve been battling with that since the account’s inception. There’s so much in the world that feels more important than sports content. What I love most is the community.

Talking to people, having productive conversations, and learning from people all over. I lose motivation for the quotes and the shitposting all the time. That’s not where my passion is.

I’ve grown as a person with the account, and I just use my voice there when I’m thinking and stay connected with the community, trying to learn and grow with everyone else.

DANIEL:
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. My final question. Were you surprised when the Cavaliers lost to the HALIBAN??? (The Tyrese Halliburton Indiana Pacers).

MATT:
No. I couldn’t post anything about it because Haliburton follows me and I didn’t want to lose that follow. But no, I’m a Cleveland sports fan. 2016 was a miracle.

DANIEL:
IT WAS! You’re welcome!

MATT:
Haha yeah. It was the exception to everything. But I really did think we had a special team last year, and it was amazing seeing how revitalized Cavs fans were. My brother and his fiancée went to so many games, and when you walk around here you see Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland jerseys everywhere.

I saw the 2009 loss to the Magic and the 2010 loss to the Celtics. I’m from Akron, nothing really surprises me anymore. It is what it is.

DANIEL:
Damn. That was real. I’ve heard so many things about Akron, and I’ve never been myself. Obviously LeBron came out of there. Steph too. And you.

MATT:
There are so many beautiful people here, a ton of great hearts and people who really want the best for the community. Twitter jokes aside, I really love northeast Ohio. From spring to October it’s beautiful. We’ve got a national park here and some incredible people.

And we love basketball. The talent and passion for the game here is special. I love it.

DANIEL:
Wow, you have done the most PR for Akron I’ve ever heard in my life. Beyond LeBron dude, you’ve passed LeBron on that.

MATT:
I have to. I’ve been blessed to grow up here.

DANIEL:
Alright. Last thing. This is posting to a Warriors community. Dub Nation HQ. The best of the best. Is there one parting message you want to leave Warriors fans with as the new year starts?

MATT:
Oh… you gotta get Steph some help.

DANIEL:
WHOA OKAY OKAY, INTERVIEW OVER! WE’RE EDITING THAT OUT!

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