Ochocinco-To-Raiders Story Is Bogus

There’s an item on bleacherreport.com suggesting that the Raiders have traded running back Michael Bush and a second-round pick to the Bengals for receiver Chad Ochocinco. We had planned to ignore the “report” and anything else that bleacherreport.com ever posts in light of the fact that: (1) stuff can apparently be posted there by pretty much anyone; and (2) they pulled this crap last month with a report that Jay Cutler would be traded to the Redskins, who would trade Jason Campbell and Chris Cooley to the Browns, who would send Brady Quinn to the Broncos. But we’ve gotten so many e-mails asking us to comment on it that the only way to stop most of the e-mails is to address the situation. (And, yes, we’ll actually still continue to get some e-mails asking us about the situation even after we post this item on it.) Here’s our official take: The bleacherreport.com item is a pile of crap. How do we know this? Because it’s labeled as “humor” at the top of the page. Whether it initially carried the “humor” label isn’t known. Last month’s Cutler report likewise was called “satire,” but we wonder whether it’s a CYA move that the folks who run the bleacherreport.com show use when something presented as a done deal turns out to be dead wrong. In this case (as in the case of the Cutler report) we don’t see the “humor” or the “satire.” It was posted on April 3, so it’s not an April Fool’s Day joke. And there’s absolutely nothing about the story that induces laughter. Bottom line? We suggest ignoring anything and everything posted at bleacherreport.com until they become something other than a wild west repository for anything that anyone feels like posting.