The Great Twitter Scare of 2011

It seemed like just your average Tuesday night. Sitting on the couch watching the Marlins game, thinking the day in USF Athletics was over. I'm sure many of my fellow twitter members felt the same as I did: another pretty normal, uneventful night in the world of USF sports. That was until about 10 p.m. when our beloved school newspaper, The Oracle, posted a tweet that would turn on the panic meter for the next 45 minutes:

See how the rest of the night unraveled after the jump

Our anguish wasn't exactly quelled by this post by Big East Coast Bias blogger Mark, but we all knew it was true:

Open the gates, let the floodwaters flow. As soon as we USF bloggers saw this post, we all just assumed that it was going to be about The softball team, whose most recent game was under investigation by the Big East and the NCAA. Then St. Petersburg Times blogger Greg Auman brought up a point that was supposed to ease away our concern, but in fact opened a whole new realm of possibilities for this announcement:

Now the panic meter was considerably higher. If it isn't about softball, what could it possibly be about? It might still even be about softball. Maybe AD Woolard wasn't going to wait until the end of this investigation and was just going to fire Ericksen. After I realized that Ericksen has been way too good of a coach for this to be the thing that causes his firing, the worst thought of all jumped into my head:

Now I'm hoping they fire Ericksen. Any news would be better than that news, except for an announcement that something horrible happened to some member of the coaching staff or something like that. Regardless, we had no choice but to wait. After putting that UCF thing out there in the universe, though, Matt and I couldn't settle down. The wait was killing us now:

We couldn't hang on much longer, hoping now that AD Woolard would come out already and say whatever it is that he called us here for. Finally, about 45 minutes later, we received the announcement.

Here are some of our reactions:

So that was it. After all that speculation and nail biting, it turns out that Coach Ericksen will sit out Game 1 of the Big East tournament against Louisville, but then everything will go back to normal. Actually, NCAA rules require that the coach be suspended for two games, but the conference may (and did) reduce the suspension if they see necessary. Let this be a testament to what the Big East officials think about DePaul. There was only one thing on my mind at the end of all this: