Toledo deletes tweet saying it would change its mascot to Shrek
The folks in the University of Toledo media relations office had quite a day.
On Tuesday morning, Toledo’s main Twitter account — @UToledo — sent out the following tweet:
Naturally, the tweet took off like wildfire, garnering thousands and thousands of retweets as the day progressed. Who wouldn’t want a random university in Ohio to change its mascot to a famous animated ogre? Seeing Shrek on the sideline for some midweek #MACtion during the 2018 football season certainly would have caught our attention.
But it would not have been fair to this guy:
Darn it! Rocky got jealous about the possibility of being replaced, and deleted the tweet! pic.twitter.com/gF6g9whisS
— The University of Toledo (@UToledo) April 24, 2018
Sometime in the afternoon after somewhere in the range of 90,000 retweets, the Shrek tweet was deleted and replaced with the tweet above. The school’s actual mascot, Rocky the Rocket, was apparently not on board with being replaced.
In actuality, the school said its viral tweet had turned into a “distraction.”
“The tweet was meant to be fun, but it caused too much of a distraction,” Christine Billau, media relations specialist at UT, said in an email.
At its height, the tweet was receiving roughly 1,000 new retweets every two minutes. In an earlier email, Billau said, “If you scroll through the account, you’ll see our social media team regularly has a lot of fun to engage and joke with our students. … We constantly engage our students with memes and jokes on Twitter to create a community with our followers and draw attention to the University.”
That’s certainly not a bad way get the school’s name out there on a random Tuesday afternoon.
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Sam Cooper is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
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