LeBron James caused an eruption on Twitter and across newswires this morning after announcing via Sports Illustrated that he’s returning to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
His announcement ended days of intense speculation, with various reports noting different scenarios. But it appears that a coding guru may have predicted LeBron’s plan ahead of time by examining the code on his personal website.
Earlier this week, the folks over at Bro Jackson did some digging into James’ website — which is pretty awful, as Slate notes — and found a few color palettes on blank pages within the website’s code that matched Cleveland’s team colors:
Web developer friend's take on the http://t.co/dXsyYmTPNh stuff: pic.twitter.com/3d8UPEXrTj
— Matt Borcas (@mattborcas) July 10, 2014
This post goes into more detail of how the developers got into the back end of LeBron’s website and noticed the color schemes, among other things. Many anticipated that LeBron would announce his decision via the website, but he ended up scribing a letter on Sports Illustrated instead.
It’s not entirely clear if the palettes were really an indication that LeBron had decided on Cleveland. On his website today, the only Cleveland-related content is a small hexagonal photo of LeBron in a Cavaliers jersey that links to the SI letter.
Regardless, it’s funny that a developer — not an esteemed reporter with reliable sources — may have actually broke the LeBron news in the first place.
