Man running UMBC's Twitter account 'decided to give it a personality for the night'
There are two ways to react after a big upset win. You can be humble and magnanimous. Or you can go the Kenny Powers' route.
After the University of Maryland-Baltimore County men's basketball team stunned top-seeded Virginia on Friday night in the NCAA Tournament, the Retrievers' athletic department Twitter account went Kenny Powers on its doubters.
Powers was the fictional character in the HBO series "Eastbound & Down," who was never afraid to speak his mind.
No. 16 seeds are now 1-135 all-time in the men's NCAA Tournament, and if you were the 1 in that statistic, you wouldn't be above a little gloating as well. That's exactly what UMBC did on Twitter.
After the game, Slam magazine talked with Zach Seidel, who runs the account. Seidel said he was upset when Seth Davis said during CBS Sports' broadcast that he would write in Virginia advancing with a Sharpie. That was one minute into the game.
Here is what Seidel told Slam magazine:
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been at UMBC for 10 years and I’ve dealt with a lot of crap from people: Maryland, Towson–good schools, but they treat us like the little brother. When I saw (Davis) tweet that, I was going to do something professional, but then the 10 years of frustration came out. Nobody gives us a chance and it really set me off. I was like, “You know what? We’re going to have fun tonight and I’m going to keep tweeting at him.” I saw more and more people were liking us and I was like, “This is really good for the school, I’m just going to keep tweeting at him,” and then (Davis) deleted his tweet, which people noticed. I just decided to give it a personality for the night.
Mission accomplished.
One of his first targets was Davis:
There was also a jab at ESPN:
Not surprisingly, UMBC poked fun at Maryland:
After ESPN's Jay Bilas said this:
UMBC tweeted this:
Another Maryland fan chimed in:
And promptly got smacked down:
The haters kept coming as did the retorts from UMBC:
During the game, UMBC had 5,588 Twitter followers and that led to this observation:
The response?
By the way, that number was up to 59,323 by mid-morning on Saturday.
Next up for UMBC is a game against Kansas State. Seidel told Slam magazine that he'll be ready for any Wildcats fans that try to belittle the school.
"Sometimes when I tweet games I tweet with that personality, it just happened that today was when a 16-seed beat a 1-seed, so more people noticed it," Seidel said. "It’s going to be the same tweets, if you come at us, we’re going to have a little fun with you."
This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 9:15 AM with the headline "Man running UMBC's Twitter account 'decided to give it a personality for the night'."