The viral on-court Uber Eats food delivery that surfaced from Duquesne’s basketball game against Loyola Chicago was just a prank after all.
Jenna Harner, from WPXI in Pittsburgh, reported that Duquesne confirmed “this was a prank, planned in advance, done for internet exposure.”
“While the incident may have seemed funny at the time, and no harm was done, we are mindful that incidents like this can put players and officials at risk.”
The university’s statement came about 15 hours after Austin Hansen, an assistant athletics director for content development and broadcast operations at Loyola Chicago, posted a five-part thread on Twitter to debunk the legitimacy of a clip that spread across social media Wednesday night. Hansen included his own video clip and still image from his vantage point along the baseline, where he was stationed with a camera.
“This kid was clearly doing a prank for Youtube/TikTok,” he wrote in his second tweet. “You can see that he is wearing a microphone, and tons of students were filming him with their phones.”
The image shows the delivery man wearing an apparent microphone attached to either his yellow jacket or shirt. Hansen added that the delivery man wasn’t kicked out of UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse afterward, either, as he “casually walked back into the stands with his McDonalds in hand.”
Early in the second half of Wednesday’s game, the delivery man stepped onto the court as a pair of players — one from Duquesne and one from Loyola Chicago — fought for positioning in the right corner. A referee motioned for him to get off the court, but he didn’t appear to listen as play headed toward the opposite end of the floor.
Duquesne head coach Keith Dambrot said postgame that the experience represented the “craziest thing he’s ever seen.” Abby Schnable, who covers college sports for the Post-Gazette, tweeted that the arena showed “the guy who was supposed to get the food” on the video board.
“I really didn’t see it, that’s how crazy it is,” Dambrot said, according to the paper. “I just saw the video after the game. Our guys were dying laughing in [the locker room]. Guy had a job to do. He did his job well.”
The Post-Gazette also reported that when Dambrot coached at Eastern Michigan — where he worked as an assistant from 1996-98 — “some friends of the team had ice cream delivered to the opposing coach in the middle of the game.”
But this instance was just a setup, one that attracted plenty of attention to an innocuous Atlantic-10 game involving two teams with a combined 21-20 record. Duquesne defeated Loyola Chicago, 72-58.
“I will personally tackle anyone else who does this,” Hansen wrote in his final tweet. “Just let the athletes play the game without worry that they are going to get hurt by a stray delivery person.”