How Call Of Duty Voice Chat Leaked An NFL Trade
You've undoubtedly been in this situation before. You're on the phone, talking to someone about an NFL trade that might send you to another team. Meanwhile, your significant other is playing a video game, and your phone conversation gets picked up on voice chat. Pretty soon, news of your potential career move spreads online, and the whole world knows about your new team before Adam Schefter can even open the Twitter app on his phone. This is pretty common, right?
You've surely realized by now that, no, it's not. But this is the exact situation that played out this past weekend for NFL guard Rashaad Coward, and the pieces that had to fall into place for this to occur are downright fascinating.
To start, Coward's wife Tally is an on-again, off-again Twitch streamer who uses the handle oohtally on the platform. She wasn't live at the time Coward's conversation leaked out, but she was playing Call of Duty: Warzone and was on comms during her session. As fate would have it, a Reddit user by the name of ProbationOffice2035 was in one of her lobbies, and managed to catch some of Coward's phone call in the background. As the Redditer put it, Coward was talking about how "he would love to play in Pittsburgh," and was thinking about greenlighting a trade to the Steelers. When the Reddit user asked Tally about her husband, she was understandably apprehensive about revealing his identity, but did confirm he was an NFL player.
This interaction led ProbationOffice2035 to do a little extra digging afterward. They found some of Tally's social accounts and noted that she had some Bears merch present in some of her content. This seemed like evidence Tally's husband played for Chicago. Unfortunately, that's as far as the Redditer got. They couldn't connect the rest of the dots to figure out who Tally was married to. They posted to Reddit about a potential trade between the Bears and Steelers, filling everyone in on what they'd experienced. Then Rashaad Coward dropped a cryptic tweet — one referring to "Gods plan" — and in the eyes of many Redditers, locked it in. It wasn't long before NFL news outlets swooped in to make it official.
As USA Today reported yesterday, Rashaad Coward — a restricted free agent — is indeed expected to sign with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Rather hilariously, before that news broke, Coward's agent gave a nod to the situation, tweeting, "Can confirm that @OohTally is an entertaining gamer and y'all should follow her on all platforms." If nothing else, this is a good reminder that you should be very careful around any mic that is connected to the internet. At least Rashaad Coward wasn't reading off his credit card numbers.