A retraction and apology to John Randle, Daunte Culpepper and Tommy Kramer

Hello.

My name is Joe Johnson. I am the owner of UFFda! Sports, which includes our main sites VikingsTerritory.com and purplePTSD.com. I began purplePTSD in May of 2015, and purchased VikingsTerritory prior to training camp in 2017. It’s long been a dream of mine to not only cover the Minnesota Vikings for a living, but to run a company that does things the right way.

I like to believe that the reason we’re not only the largest source for Vikings news but the largest single sport news network in the world, is that I’ve largely accomplished that. I believe in treating people the way I would want to be treated. That extends to our interns, our senior writers, and our columnists internally and the myriad of former players and coaches we work with externally.

Recently, however, an article was posted on our network that went against everything we’ve spent six years building. It wasn’t done the right way, or for the right reasons. Now. I didn’t write the article, but as the owner of this network I take full responsibility for everything that gets posted on our network.

The article in question was about the cancelled/rescheduled boat party on Lake Minnetonka that I’m sure you’ve heard about and seen a lot of jokes about, as well. One of our senior writers had seen a couple Vikings Twitter entities that have a decent following saying they’d heard rumors that Daunte Culpepper, Tommy Kramer and John Randle were going to be attending the rescheduled event.

There was no truth to those rumors. One of the Twitter entities asked that writer to remove the article about 20-30 minutes. But, in that time a lot of people saw the article and it reached both Tommy Kramer and John Randle. I want to reiterate, there was no truth they were attending. They weren’t.

The Vikings media market is surprisingly small. Reputation is everything. With one article last week we not only harmed the reputation we’ve worked over half a decade to build, but much more importantly we potentially harmed the reputation of some of the former players that I’ve sacrificed over half my prime earning years on this crazy dream because I watched them as a child.

Again. I didn’t write the article in question. But I am the owner of this network and therefore everything that gets posted on the network is my responsibility.

That boat party is something we’ve been promoting and planned on covering in person. Bryant McKinnie cohosts a podcast we promote on our network. I know the writer made an honest mistake, but it’s something that is why we don’t trade in Twitter rumors.

Anyone that loves the Vikings enough to read our stuff knows there are countless people on Twitter who pretend to have sources and literally make up insider “scoops” with the hopes they’re right 1% of the time. That’s partially why we don’t cover Twitter rumors unless we can confirm them independently, outside of the rumors that are as large as they are laughably stupid like the “Julio Jones to Minnesota” rumor last month.

The other reason is something my mentor and co-host of my radio show, Joe Oberle, taught me years ago after I submitted an article calling for a player to be cut.

These aren’t just famous, rich football players. They’re human beings. The reputation I spoke about above? They’ve worked their entire lives to build their brand, and for players from decades ago those reputations are even more important as they can monetize their brands with sponsors.

The article that covered the above rumor may have said “rumor has it”, it may have been up for 20 minutes, it may have not been done with any semblance of malice behind it.

That doesn’t matter.

Our process wasn’t followed and our site gave people the impression that Culpepper, Randle and Kramer were part of a boat party that seems like a bad idea at best. Our site implied that they’d co-sign an event that, while not being promoted as Sex Boat 2.0, is how everyone is interpreting it.

So, I wanted to post a full retraction. Take responsibility. Promise to do an internal review of our process and make changes, and apologize profusely to Culpepper, Kramer and Randle.

This isn’t why I started this network, and it’s something that I and we will strive incredibly hard to make up to those three but also to show Culpepper, Randle, and Kramer and our audience that we are taking this seriously. We are sorry. And we will do better, and forever be in debt to those guys.

I also want to say as a sidenote that I spoke with Randle directly and his class, understanding, and kindness during this situation were a testament to what a good person he is. I didn’t deserve or earn anything of the sort from him. He had every right to be furious with me. But, he really kind to me, and so I wanted to apologize but also thank Mr. Randle for being a great guy on top of everything else. Class act.

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