ESPN's hugely popular columnist, "Sports Guy" Bill Simmons, accidentally tweeted "moss vikings" Tuesday afternoon, hours before NFL beat reporters ever released word of this morning's Randy Moss trade.

This is fascinating for two reasons:

Simmons is not known for breaking news. He's a constant supply of humor and pop-culture references, but isn't known for developing sources, or traditional reporting.

The three or four reporters that usually do break this kind of news, including ESPN's Adam Schefter and Fox Sports' Jay Glazer, only mentioned anything about this story after Simmons' tweet. Glazer finally disclosed the information he'd been sitting on for hours when Simmons' tweet went viral.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

Simmons’s innocuous, now-deleted “moss vikings” tweet, which he claims was meant to be sent as a private message, is by no means a moment of “Dewey Defeats Truman” magnitude. But it still sparked a firestorm of re-tweets, e-mails and texts, as a trade of Randy Moss from a 3-1 team to a Brett Favre-led 1-2 squad could be league-changing. Simmons claimed a few times that it was an accident, but Yahoo’s Chris Chase remains dubious, pointing out that it took Simmons 30 minutes to delete the tweet, an action that usually takes 16 seconds.

It also led to this hysterical trending hashtag: #SportsGuyDMs