The man behind a popular Twitter account that holds sports pundits accountable for hot takes gone wrong has a new book that puts a spotlight on poorly aged NFL predictions.
Fred Segal, a South Florida-based former attorney, founded and operates "Freezing Cold Takes," which has accumulated nearly 600,000 Twitter followers since launching in 2015. His formula is simple: he finds once-bold predictions and hot takes that fizzled out and unearths them. The idea began as a counter to media members who repost accurate predictions with self-congratulatory messages.
"I said to myself, ‘Someone should be the person who reposts the tweets and the quotes where some of those same media folks turned out to be completely wrong,’ and I just became that person," Segal told Fox News Digital.
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Over the past seven years, Segal has constantly reminded his followers that pundits aren’t perfect, such as the time NBA analysts predicted four-time champion Stephen Curry wouldn’t amount to anything in professional basketball. On occasion, he strays from sports, and has unearthed nuggets such as a 1995 article predicting the internet wouldn’t amount to much, along with exposing entertainment reporters who predicted successful programs such as "Better Call Saul" would flop or claimed Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson were in it for the long haul. But he largely sticks to sports and fans have responded, constantly tagging his Twitter handle in response to hot takes that have the potential for disaster.
"I didn't expect the feed to become big, but it did and then eventually allowed me to write my first book, which was about historical NFL predictions gone wrong," he said.
Segal’s new book, "Freezing Cold Takes: NFL," puts a spotlight on football’s most inaccurate predictions and the stories behind them. He had so much content that he could "probably wrote a second book really easily" with what he was forced to leave out. He decided to focus on historical teams and failed predictions that occurred long before social media helped expose imperfect punditry.
"Stuff I post to my feed is more recent, about teams that are going on and playing right now, like when the Rams won the Super Bowl, you post all the people say they weren't going to win the Super Bowl," he said. "But historical teams, great teams of the past, they had great players, material about the NFL draft and some of the great players that played in this league and commentary about them… I wanted it to be on teams people knew but may not have remembered some of the things that were said about those teams."
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The book includes laughable-in-hindsight criticism of the Dallas Cowboys for hiring Hall of fame coach Jimmy Johnson in 1989, the legendary Herschel Walker trade that helped shape the Cowboys’ dynasty of the 1990s, backlash to the Green Bay Packers trading for legendary quarterback Brett Favre and a look at pundits who felt 13-time All-Pro selection and Hall of Famer Reggie White was overpaid, among a variety of other botched predictions. He even found people who predicted the New England Patriots would regret hiring Bill Belichick, who has since won six Super Bowls.
Segal believes the success of "Freezing Cold Takes" has forced some sports talking heads to think before they speak, but others haven’t changed their ways one bit.
"Some people, maybe if they're about to say something that maybe it doesn't have as much basis as they think would think about it more, knowing that once they put it out there, if it doesn't come true, if it doesn't come true, it could possibly be ridiculed on the Internet, not even just my feed, because I mean, there's a lot of people now who remember what everyone says, and they're immediately ready to pounce on it when it happens" he said. "But I think that there's a lot of commentators who just don't look at it that way and are saying what they feel and don't really worry about that."
In that regard, Segal believes that many sports pundits have a lot in common with politicians.
"Politicians are saying things all the time, all politicians, and they turn out to be wrong. And people on the internet make fun of it and they don't look back, and they just keep going, you know? So, I mean, I think that a lot of commentators have that same kind of mentality," Segal said. "And it's not the wrong mentality to have, because if you're going to be interesting, you're going to be bold, and you can't be apologetic about everything you get wrong."
While politicians could provide endless content for Segal, he’s decided to keep the "extremely divisive" political world out of his feed. He believes politics are so contentious simply because there aren’t enough "teams" to root for, and he doesn’t want to bring contentious quarreling to his growing social media presence.
"Take college football, for example. There's nothing like college football where an act by your team's coach, or an act by a player, like a despicable act… something that they do is ardently defended by your team's fans. But if the same act was done by another team, or a rival team, you'd be arguing against it, you know, it's just to support the team mentality," he said.
"I think for 75% of issues that… are tangential to politics, if someone has an opinion on that, you can probably guess what their political biases are because it's so divisive. Now, in sports, it's different because there are so many teams," Segal continued. "But in politics, there's two teams essentially."
"Freezing Cold Takes: NFL" is available now.
