Play calling turned into real FaceTime calling when a high school basketball team accidentally wound up on the phone with Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It all started when the Notre Dame Preparatory freshmen boys’ basketball team, in Pontiac, Michigan, started a group text, but one of the players mistakenly typed in a wrong digit for one of his teammates. Last week, that person wrote back and that person happened to be Sean Murphy-Bunting, a cornerback for the defending Super Bowl champions.
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What happened next was captured on Twitter by P. Jason Whalen, a counselor at the school who wrote that his son is one of the students on the freshmen team.
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Murphy-Bunting, who grew up Michigan, replied that he was definitely not their teammate and sent along a selfie of himself in the Bucs locker room to prove it.
After the students received the selfie, Whalen tweeted, "Some of the boys still think it’s their buddy joking around others are like WTH is going on. There is some back and forth with some pretty funny dialogue before SMB FaceTimes the group chat. All I hear is my son laughing his ass off, in total disbelief at what is going on…"
“Everyone was skeptical, because it’s definitely not an NFL player, right?” Notre Dame player Vinny Tartaglia, who was in charge of adding numbers to the text, told NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit.
The group text then got a bonus when a FaceTime call took place and several Buccaneers jumped on, including running back Leonard Fournette, who walked the hoopsters through the locker room, while giving them a glimpse of players such as Murphy-Bunting, Mike Evans, Rob Gronkowski and Richard Sherman.
One player, of course, was notably absent: Tom Brady. Eventually, the seven-time Super Bowl champ, who went to the University of Michigan, hopped on the phone.
“I’m a Michigan fan too and I told him ‘Go Blue! We’re going to beat OSU!’” player AJ Valentine said, referring to Michigan’s annual football game with rival Ohio State.
“That was sweet,” Brady told ESPN about the call. “I didn’t know who it was. (Fournette) said, ‘Here’s my boy’ or whatever he said. It was nice. It would have been nice for me when I had been in high school too.”
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“They didn’t have to do that for us,” Notre Dame's Nate Seaman told WDIV. “They could have easily just said, ‘I’m going to leave the group chat’ and then they could’ve just left.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
