Getty Image / Sean M. Haffey
The ‘Rookie Dinner’ is a time-honored tradition amongst NFL players. It’s a time when the young blood gets to pick up the bill for the veterans, and the vets go out of their way to eat as much food as humanly possible while drinking the most expensive wine and champagne in the house.
For this year’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers Offensive Line rookie dinner the veterans decided to take a different tactic and prank the shit out of the rookies. Greg Auman is the Buccaneers beat writer for the Tampa Bay Times. Earlier this week he tweeted out this picture of the bill from the Bucs’ dinner:
$26,357 is enough to make anyone sick, even a rookie who just signed a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there were some peculiarities on the bill that caught people’s attention. Someone reckoned that it would take 26 O-linemen to eat $26,000 worth of food. That’s when Left Tackle Donovan Smith hopped on Twitter to explain:
Tampa Bay rookie Korren Kirven spoke with ESPN‘s Jenna Laine and explained that the $26,000+ bill was all a prank, and the rookies actually didn’t have to pay for anything at all this year. The actual bill was only around $3,000 and the veterans picked up the tab. (h/t Bleacher Report)