It's tough to get your foot out of your mouth. Sometimes, it takes three years.
Consider James Conradt, currently a manager of the University of Texas Computing Services Department and a Nebraska football fan. By the way, he's no relation to Jody. Conradt is a regular on various Internet message boards dedicated to the Huskers to find the latest news on his team and voice his opinion.
But sometimes message board posts can go a little too far.
Conradt, in an attempt to get Oklahoma fans "all riled up," as he told The Oklahoman, copied the template of the paper's Web site, newsok.com, and wrote a fake story about Sooner quarterbacks Sam Bradford and Landry Jones, claiming they both were arrested on cocaine distribution charges. Conradt then posted the false story on a message board Wednesday.
Conradt's story was then reported as fact by at least two radio stations in Texas.
The story has since been reported as fake with Landry's father declaring he plans to "prosecute [Conradt] to the fullest extent of the law."
"I want to express my deepest apologies to the families," Conradt told the Oklahoman. "That's the thing I'm regretful about. I didn't want to hurt anyone."
But the 36-year old's full story does not begin and end with his misguided Internet hoax.
On Jan. 10, 2005, the Lincoln Journal Star ran a story about the amount of time spent on Internet message boards by Husker fans. The story talked about how less than scrupulous posters had the power to spread rumors that would believe.
Guess who was one of the message board fans interviewed in the story?
"I think anonymity brings out the worst in people," Conradt, then living in Lincoln, told the Star. "There are no consequences for saying what you say. I think that's probably where the whole concept of 'flaming' comes from. They probably didn't have that in the old days around the coffee pot at work, the profanity-laced, ultra-negative outbursts."
And they certainly didn't have fans going as far as forging newspaper templates in order to "rile up" a couple of Sooner fans.
Conradt, also known as "Darth Husker" according to the story, also acknowledged that some posters are given more credibility when it comes to rumors and are thus able to fool readers.
"It's funny," Conradt said. "New people come along all the time and are naive and believe too much of what they read. A lot of people just post stuff to stir the pot."
Three years after expressing an awareness that the anonymous nature of the Web could lead to "flaming" and false rumors intended to "stir the pot," Conradt has done both.
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