If you follow Emeka Egbuka on social media, you better make sure it’s actually Emeka Egbuka. Someone purporting to be the NFL wide receiver started a firestorm this week when he posted a simple four-word question on X, “Is CTE even real?”
The posting quickly gained a lot of traction, and it didn’t take long before the Buccaneers were forced to respond. In a statement posted on X, the Bucs made it clear that the CTE comment was posted by a fake Egbuka account.
Normally, this would be the end of the story, but in this situation, this is actually where things get even more interesting. One reason everyone assumed that the CTE tweet came from Egbuka’s real account is that the Buccaneers regularly tagged the account on X for almost a full year.
After the Buccaneers selected Egbuka with the 19th overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, they announced the move in a tweet, and guess who got tagged?
Three minutes after that tweet, the Bucs shared a video of Roger Goodell announcing the Egbuka pick, and once again, the account got tagged.
It’s not clear how the Buccaneers got his profile name on X, but once they sent out those two draft tweets, most fans would have simply assumed that @EgbukaEmeka belonged Egbuka. After all, the tweets came from the team.
The two tweets sent out on draft day ended up being two of 58 times that the Buccaneers tagged @EgbukaEmeka in a tweet as pointed out by Front Office Sports.
Two days after the draft, Egbuka was featured in a video on the team’s X account, and once again, @EgbukaEmeka got tagged.
If the @EgbukaEmeka didn’t belong to Egbuka, you would think that he would have said something at this point.
All of those tweets were sent out back in April, so if the @EgbukaEmeka profile was fake, you would think the team would have realized it at some point, but nope. The Buccaneers tagged the profile in a tweet that was sent on Jan. 3, 2026.
And just when you think that things couldn’t get any more bizarre, they get more bizarre. The Buccaneers Communications team has an X account, and they’re the ones who tweeted out that the @EgbukaEmeka account was fake. In an interesting twist, they actually tagged the @EgbukaEmeka handle back in June.
It’s one thing for the team’s official account to get it wrong, but you’d think the communications team would have the correct profile name for each player.
The Buccaneers apparently had no idea that they spent nine months tagging an account that didn’t actually belong to Egbuka.
In the old days of Twitter, it would’ve been almost impossible for something like this to happen, because celebrities, athletes and other public figures were given a blue checkmark so that everyone knew that they were actually who they said they were. Those rules are no longer in place, and if someone wants a blue checkmark, they just have to buy one, so it’s impossible to know who’s real and who’s not. I’m real.
The Buccaneers clearly thought this account was real until they found out it wasn’t.
The @EgbukaEmeka account has now been suspended, and it likely won’t be sending out any more posts, unless of course, the real Emeka Egbuka asks if he can have it. For now, the best place to follow Egbuka on social media is on Instagram, where he’s verified and has nearly 300,000 followers.
