Spread of false claims about coach using gay slur is ‘alarming,’ UConn says
A seemingly false post about UConn basketball head coach Dan Hurley has in turn triggered actual homophobia. The post Spread of false claims about coach using gay slur is ‘alarming,’ UConn says appeared first on Outsports.
Mark
Tall tales concocted for engagement farming by monetized blue-tick accounts have become commonplace on X. In some corners, it’s become a place that often feels like you could be within three tweets of stumbling upon a homophobic slur.
In that universe, a bogus post about UConn Huskies basketball head coach Dan Hurley has gained pace and distance so quickly in the space of 48 hours — even an NBA legend helped it gain traction — that a team spokesperson has described its spread as “alarming.”
The post went up in the aftermath of Wednesday night’s thrilling 103-98 come-from-behind victory for the Huskies at Providence.
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At halftime, Hurley learned he had incurred a technical foul as he made his way to the locker room. He later said on X that such an occurrence wasn’t as common as people might think.
Asked by CT Insider later to explain what happened, he said: “I was in a conversation with one of the officials, it was give and take.
“Another official that wasn’t involved in the conversation was the one who inserted himself.”
I don’t get as many technical fouls as people think. And tonight was my first technical foul outside of our locker room.— Dan Hurley (@dhurley15) January 8, 2026
That would have been the end of it, until an X account under the name of a supposed sports journalist went on a fishing trip.
The account is verified but not authenticated or linked to any media outlet, which is by no means unusual in the Wild West of trigger-happy gunslingers on X.
The post alleged “per sources” that after Hurley was told by the officials about his technical foul, he responded with ableist and homophobic slurs, and that he could be suspended for the rest of the season.
Numerous users immediately pointed out that there was no evidence to support any of these claims. Yet because other users were either duped or happy to go along with the hoodwinking game, this bullet of basketball bunkum rapidly ricocheted around the Musk-verse.
UConn disturbed by escalation of post from ‘fictitious account’
It was a classic example of how disagreement drives the X algorithm. Even five-time NBA champion Ron Harper fueled the false-information machine, replying with a comment about Hurley: “We all know that he can’t control his emotions.”
Within 24 hours, a right-wing news and opinion website had latched onto the X post and gleefully circulated it further via an article with Hurley’s name and the slurs (with asterisks) in the headline, ending with the word ‘REPORT’ — just in case they needed to cover themselves.
Did they believe it was true? No matter. The writer was desperate to deride the suggestion that using highly discriminatory language was such a serious matter. “I’m so sick and tired of all the politically correct nonsense that I can’t help but stand up and clap for Dan Hurley,” he wrote.
Outsports reached out to the UConn Huskies media team and asked if they were aware of the X post and the coverage it was receiving.
How many outlets need to pick up the fake Dan Hurley story before UConn says something about it?— Russell Steinberg (@Russ_Steinberg) January 9, 2026
A spokesperson replied: “Thank you for reaching out. It is extremely alarming how much it has taken off from an entirely fictitious account.
“UConn has no official comment. We feel no need to comment on fiction.”
The post has also been the subject of fact-check articles that explain the background to the post and how the account behind it has zero credibility.
Spurious, pseudo sports reporting is proliferating on social media at such a rate that it can often feel futile to call it out.
Yet as we’ve seen this week with Grok’s AI deepfake images, there is always a tipping point.
We can expect many more of these invented incidents about gay slurs in sports on social media. Mostly, they fail, but sometimes they flourish.
That’s when sports teams should consider taking aim at the shams. In doing so, they’ll also be preventing right-wing commentators from playing to the gallery.
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The post Spread of false claims about coach using gay slur is ‘alarming,’ UConn says appeared first on Outsports.
