Drew Brees Struck By Idiotic Marketing Ploy, Not Lightning

The ongoing arms race between the online sportsbooks that have stood up their businesses in various states almost requires all those who participate in it to humiliate themselves. Give enough people access to huge budgets and an increasingly desperate desire to achieve market capture, and you are bound to end up with someone standing in front of their colleagues in a conference room and saying, "What if we pretended to kill Drew Brees with lightning?"

That's how this video, which purported to show Brees struck by lightning while filming a commercial in Venezuela, gained attention Thursday night:

ProFootballTalk's Mike Florio was the unlucky sucker who took the bait and wrote a post about Brees "apparently" being struck by lightning. Unfortunately for Florio, he was credulous enough to include the sportsbook's handle in his tweet.

This was not Florio's best or most careful work, but it did create the conditions under which ESPN's Saints reporter Katherine Terrell sent this context-free tweet:

Anyway, the whole thing was cooked up by an online sportsbook that thought it would be a good idea to try and drum up publicity by pretending to get Drew Brees killed. It's back to the drawing board for those marketing geniuses.