The last 24 hours have been interesting, to say the absolute least, for Steelers rookie wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Early Tuesday, Smith-Schuster—who scored his third touchdown of the season during Pittsburgh’s win over the Bengals on Sunday—took to Twitter to report that his bike had been stolen. Smith-Schuster doesn’t have a driver’s license at the moment so the bike is his lone form of transportation, and he was heartbroken over losing it. But he tweeted his way through it, sending out a bunch of tweets about how much he was going to miss the bike.
It sucked to see Smith-Schuster lose his bike, but in the process, he picked up quite a few new Twitter followers and really put himself on the map.
Many of those followers started using the hashtag #TeamFindJuJusBike in an effort to track Smith-Schuster’s bike down, and before long, there was so much attention swirling around him that the Steelers director of communications Burt Lauten took to Twitter to request that people stop trying to get in touch with him about the damn bike.
But the strange circumstances surrounding Smith-Schuster’s day didn’t end there. At some point during the day, Out of Bounds co-host Mia Khalifa started following the ongoing saga surrounding the bike, and she reached out to Smith-Schuster to let him know that he’s her new favorite follow on Twitter.
It was an innocent enough tweet, but it sent Smith-Schuster’s day in yet another direction as he decided to respond to Khalifa. Seemingly wary of the way she has exposed several athletes (and Drake, smh) on social media in the past, Smith-Schuster let it be known that he wasn’t interested in communicating with her on Twitter, and he used a couple GIFs to really drive his point home.
Khalifa didn’t seem to mind, but she did tag Smith-Schuster’s teammate Le’Veon Bell in a response to his tweets.
All of this served as a great distraction for the big problem that is looming large over the Steelers this week. Smith-Schuster’s fellow wide receiver Martavis Bryant has reportedly asked Pittsburgh to trade him if they don’t plan on using him more on the field, and it has cast a dark cloud over the team, despite their win on Sunday. But Smith-Schuster did his part to provide a little entertainment outside of that, and in the end, it sounds like this story is going to have a happy ending.
According to police, Smith-Schuster’s bike has been found and is going to be returned to him soon.
What. A. Day.
