Ben Devine, the Chicago Bears analyst behind the account @Chicago_NFL, torched his own credibility this week when he reported a finalized stadium deal sending the Bears to Indiana, complete with a supposed name change. It was fake. Devine retracted the report, saying he'd been "duped" by a source who went to "immense lengths to verify identity." What nobody knew yet was that the source pulling the strings was apparently posing as Barstool's own Big Cat.
Turns out impersonating Dan Katz is this guy's whole bit. Barstool didn't just let it go after Devine's public retraction — they hunted the impersonator down and put him on The Yak to explain himself.
The man behind the impersonation sat down for an interview and copped to duping Devine, claiming he's doing it purely for the love of the game.
That's the wildest part of this whole thing. This isn't some elaborate scheme for money or clout under his own name — the guy builds fake credibility as a Barstool employee just to see how far he can push a story before someone catches on. Devine, for what it's worth, wasn't naive about it either. He told followers the source "sounded fishy" from the jump and said he required multiple forms of verification before running with it. Didn't matter. Whoever this is apparently has the routine down cold.
And Devine isn't the only name on the list. Barstool's own reporting says this isn't the first time the guy has pulled off the fake-Big-Cat routine on a reporter, which is what turned a one-off retraction into an actual investigation worth putting on the show.
Big Cat himself teased the segment before it aired, name-checking "Fake Big Cat" directly on the way to plugging the show. Considering the guy has apparently been running this bit on multiple reporters, it says something about how much weight a Big Cat DM or a Big Cat-branded tip still carries in football media circles — enough that a well-executed impersonation can get a report out the door before anyone double-checks.
There's no word yet on whether this guy faces any real consequences beyond public embarrassment, or whether he's already cooking up his next target. But between Devine's retraction and Barstool's own investigation, the lesson for reporters chasing a scoop is pretty simple: if "Big Cat" slides into your DMs with a huge story, maybe make a call before you hit publish.