Evan Mathis Pranks Media with Fake $64,055.76 Del Frisco’s Receipt

Eagles offensive lineman Evan Mathis has a little (maybe a lot) of fun with the media.
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As one of the top offensive linemen in the NFL, Eagles guard Evan Mathis pushes people around for a living. And he’s also one of the wittier players in the game, at least if you define wit as “the ability to be a wiseass on Twitter” (which I obviously do). And, last night, Mathis pulled off a thorough Twitter prank.

It all starts with a $17,747.86 dinner bill from Del Frisco’s second-year-player Lane Johnson tweeted out last week. In light of last year’s Miami Dolphins hazing scandal, Johnson took some criticism for the tweet. That included a Sporting News piece that originally identified Mathis and teammate Todd Herremans, both 10 year veterans, as rookies — a piece Mathis joked about on Twitter.

(As Sheil Kapadia wrote on our own Birds 24/7, Johnson said Herremans and Mathis helped him pay that bill — Johnson was a rookie last season, but the team didn’t have its annual bonding dinner. And center Jason Kelce said the team told Johnson he probably shouldn’t have tweeted the photo. “What are you trying to accomplish by posting that on the Internet?” he told WIP this morning. “Seventeen thousand dollars is half of somebody’s yearly salary, maybe some peoples’ full — it’s never a good thing to put out on the Internet.” Reasonable stuff! I’m hoping the entire Eagles offensive line will soon be guest lecturing at Penn on a variety of topics.)

Anyway, Thursday night Mathis tweeted out another team “receipt” from Del Frisco’s.

Let’s end any suspense. It’s fake. It’s an acrostic, and it’s so good I’d like to nominate it for inclusion into any list of 2014’s best poetry. The items purchased spell out ROCK PAPER SCISSORS ROSHAMBO. And they also include hilarious bits like 1 iced tea, and 1 Everbeer — a shot of Everclear poured into a Busch Light. “I had to go to a bartending website because I needed something that started with an E. Everbeer? At Del Frisco’s?” Mathis tweeted.

If you’re going to pull a prank, go all out. Mathis did. Here’s another wrinkle: In April, Daily News football writer Paul Domowitch asked Mathis if he’d be at off-season team activities. Mathis replied with a screenshot of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Domowitch reported he’d be skipping the workouts; Mathis showed up at camp. Mathis later apologized, and Domowitch said Mathis told him to take him at his word, but “never take me for my pics, pins, [and] emoticons.” And what was this receipt prank? A photo. Layers upon layers. I’m impressed.

Still, it really should have been obvious it was fake from the start. Daily News Eagles beat writer Les Bowen noted that from the start, just on reputation: “Y’all know Evan Mathis by now, right? Yet everybody’s gonna take that receipt at face value??” But viral content needs to be produced to sustain the Internet, and stories were filed. “A good time was had by … everybody but the rookies,” CBS Sports’ Ryan Wilson wrote. “What lesson would that be, Evan?”” Sporting News’s Troy Machir added “How to strengthen the class system?”

Howard Eskin was steaming, too, but he had a different party that should be ashamed:

This is, by far, my favorite take on the whole affair.

Mathis favorited plenty of hate tweets (and praiseful ones, too) — and at one point even made fun of the recently-profiled-in-Philadelphia magazine Crossing Broad (in a since-deleted tweet). But the prank was directed at Pro Football Talk, which criticized Johnson several times.

This morning, Mathis pulled back the curtain.

This prank is up there with the fake Fox 29 school cancelation tweet as the best Philadelphia pranks of 2014. Evan Mathis is an All-Pro in pranking.

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