As in Astonishing Incompetence, I’ve waited until now to talk about this so that my post can be about the incompetence and not the politics: Tim Walz, when he was a Vice Presidential candidate, played a game of Madden Football with Alexandra Ocasio Cortez which was streamed on the streaming service Twitch. Afterwards, Tim Walz put out a hastily-deleted tweet:

The text was:

@AOC can run a mean pick 6—and I can call an audible on a play.

And we both know that if you take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re gonna use it.

I’m going to explain a bit of backstory before we get into the barely-believable incompetence of this tweet as messaging. The context unavoidably mentions politics, but I will do my absolute best to present the context in a completely neutral way, I promise, because the politics is not at all the point of this post.

The second half of the tweet was a reference to “Project 2025” which was a plan drawn up by the think-tank The Heritage Foundation, which President Trump disavowed and Democrats claimed was his plan. (Who is more correct about this is not the subject of this post.) This tweet was part of the effort of Democrats to convince people that Project 2025 was, in fact, Trump’s plan.

A further bit of backstory is that Tim Walz claimed to have been a football coach. (It turned out that he was an assistant high school football coach. For the sake of non-Americans: in both cases I mean American football.) This use of Madden, and of Walz’s putative familiarity with football, was generally understood to be part of the Democrats’ strategy to appeal to male voters.

So we finally come to the first half of the tweet, which defies belief. I have seen very little football and don’t know much about the game, so I had to look the terms up. To “run” a play is to have a plan, communicated to the players, which they then implement. A “pick 6” is where the football is thrown by the team who has possession and intercepted by the opposing team, who then conveys it to the throwing team’s end zone, scoring 6 points. (Most of the time, teams only score points when they begin play with possession of the ball.) You cannot “run a pick 6” of any kind, mean or otherwise. (“Mean,” in this context, is a metaphor for being well-planned and well-executed.) I mean, technically you could, but that would constitute trying to lose the game, since it would mean having your quarterback throw the ball not to your players, but to the opposing team, and then stand aside to let them get to your end zone. There is no normal circumstance in which you do that intentionally, and letting your opponent score points can never be described as “mean,” not even metaphorically. He clearly had no idea what the term meant. (Making it even worse, by the way, is that “pick 6” definitionally requires the scoring of six points, while the Madden football game that Walz and AOC streamed ended a 0-0 tie, meaning that no pick 6 happened, intentional or otherwise.)

That was widely talked about because it’s absurd in any context, but the incompetence of communication doesn’t stop there. I also looked up what it means to “call an audible.” It means for the quarterback to throw out the planned play in part or in whole in favor of what he’s making up on the spot and telling people. (Hence, “audible”—he has to say the new plan because it wasn’t a pre-arranged one.) While it is quite possible for a quarterback to intentionally call an audible, the coach can’t, by definition, and moreover this is exactly the opposite of what the second half of his tweet is saying. It makes exactly no sense to cite your ability to throw out a plan in favor of improvisation as your source of knowledge that “if you take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re gonna use it.”

I don’t know football well enough to say whether there were worse terms that Walz could have picked in order to make his point, but there can’t be many. It boggles the imagination as to how Walz (or an intern who clearly knows nothing about football) wrote this tweet. If you just check out Wikipedia’s page on American football plays, there is a long list of plays, by name, with descriptions. It would take only a few minutes to scroll through and find two plays which sound kind of cool. Also of note: neither the words “audible” nor “pick” appear on the page. So how did this tweet get written? How did someone go to the trouble of finding out that “pick 6” and “audible” are words associated with football without taking the extra ninety seconds to find out what they mean?

Like with the Al Smith dinner video (linked in the first paragraph), this level of incompetence is right at the border of my ability to believe it. Well, it used to be beyond it, but then this clearly happened, so I had to adjust the border of what level of incompetence I find believable. But wow. I’m a cynical man, and yet it turns out: not cynical enough.