This one's a dilly!

Let's just say we've seen ESPN.com's lazy, and it's not pretty.

We found this article-subject disagreement snafu in an article titled, "Oregon State's Stroughter expects to play at Cincy":

"The Beavers opened their season last Thursday night with a 24-7 victory at home against Utah, testing the arms of a competing sophomore QBs Sean Canfield and Lyle Moevao." (emphasis ours)

The indefinite article a does not belong here because a) the sentence refers to more than one quarterback, and b) both quarterbacks are sophomores. (It should also be noted that it is unlikely that both arms of either quarterback were tested. We admit, the very thought makes us giggle.) In short, there is no excuse for the presence of this a.

At first glance, this appears to be a simple case of Oops! Is my lazy showing? However, we noticed that a line at the end of the article indicates, "Information from The Associated Press was used in this report." Out of what some might call a morbid curiosity, we did a little digging and found the original AP story, and what to our wondering eyes should appear? No, not what you might think - but we did find the errant sentence, identical to the one found in the ESPN article.

Dear reader, we wonder if you fully understand the implications of this discovery. We are only beginning to grasp it ourselves. Here is what evidently occurred: the AP writer wrote the original sentence, which his/her editor failed to notice. ESPN got the story from the AP wire and assigned their own writer to the story. He or she then (it is to be assumed) did their own research. Please hold on--it's about to get really ugly: the hapless ESPN writer excerpted chunks of the AP article (which we know is done all the time), including the questionable sentence, but apparently did not read it carefully enough to detect the error. This means that at least four people (and possibly more) looked at this sentence and found it acceptable for publication.

We probably don't need to tell you that an error of this magnitude is in a category all its own: We Are (Almost) Speechless. It is now 11:30 a.m. We will be hysterical until 11:45 a.m.