Former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason stirred some shit on his daily radio show this morning when he claimed that the Jets asked the NFL to sweep the visiting locker room for bugs before their Oct. 25 away game against the Patriots. That was quite a bomb for Esiason to drop, but it was probably bullshit.


You can listen to the audio here. Esiason very casually mentions that the Jets asked the NFL to sweep their locker room for bugs, and it isn’t until his co-host, Craig Carton, stops him to point out what a big scoop this is that Esiason reveals where he heard it from. “That’s what I was told last night,” he says.

Pro Football Talk picked up the story and slapped an oddly declarative headline on top of a post that didn’t have much in the way of substance:

Contacted by PFT, the Jets declined comment regarding the situation. A source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that the Jets did not request that the locker room be swept for bugs; however, the source did not deny that the locker room was swept for bugs. The Patriots likewise had no comment on the situation, and the NFL could not immediately be reached for comment.


The New York Daily News reached out to a league source, who shot down Esiason’s claim. Jets beat reporter Dom Cosentino also got a flat denial from a source:

So what the hell happened here? The likely answer is that Esiason heard some third- or fourth-hand gossip while bullshitting with someone at the Dolphins-Patriots game and assumed this story was already out there, hence him bringing it up so casually this morning.

Right after bringing the story up, Carton said he was going to tweet out the scoop while they were on the air. Esiason then instructed him to pose the revelation as a question. “Why don’t you put the word ‘did’ in front of it?” he said. “And then a question mark at the end of it.”