Entertainment
How a Monday Night Football mishap may have exposed deep problems with Google Search
For nearly as long as the internet has been around, there’s a particular rhythm for any curious person with a WiFi connection. You have a question, you Google it, you get an answer. But a mishap during this week’s Monday Night Football and the NFL’s onside kick rules has show just how unreliable Google can be these days — and how the search giant can help spread misinformation.
The confusion was sparked by an unfortunate turn of events. During the waning moments of the MNF matchup the Baltimore Ravens and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — one of two ESPN games last evening — Bucs star receiver Chris Godwin suffered a gruesome injury with his team trailing by 10 points. Fans wondered why such a star player was on the field at all at when the team was down by two scores with less than a minute remaining in the game.
“We’re just trying to win the ballgame,” Tampa head coach Todd Bowles told reporters. “We’re still down 10, trying to get extra points, kick another onside kick. It just happened.”
That quote, in part, sparked the confusion. You see, the NFL revamped its kickoff before this season and changed, well, everything, including the rules for onside kicks. Surprise onside kicks were effectively banned, for instance, because the new “dynamic” kickoff requires the kicking team to declare to the refs they’re trying an onside kick. Amid all these changes — and the NFL’s penchant for making rules complicated — it tracks that confusion might arise.
Crucially, at one point there was a proposed rule change limiting how many onside kicks a team could attempt. The rule was not adopted — trailing teams can attempt unlimited onside kicks in the fourth quarter — but it did appear in an article in Sporting News that was ultimately corrected. But lots of folks online were under the false impression that, actually, the Bucs had exhausted their onside kick chances and left Godwin in the game despite that fact.
To recap: Viewers reasonably thought the Buccaneers were putting a star player’s health at risk in a hopeless situation, all because they mistakenly believed teams had a limited number of attempts to regain possession. In reality, NFL rules allow the Buccaneers to keep trying late-game kicks aimed at recovering the control of the ball. None of this is easy to understand, but it looks like Google may have made matters worse.
In fact, Google could actually be to blame for all the confusion among viewers. For some reason, Google searches on Monday night resulted in faulty information. After seeing the confusion while watching the game, I searched the rules for myself. Google spat out a clipped answer at the top of the search, citing the corrected Sporting News article, with the wrong information that a team was limited to two onside kicks per game. It’s not clear when, exactly, Sporting News made its correction, so it’s possible Google was slow in simply catching up to a correction made by the outlet. But Google showed me an answer no longer present in the article itself.
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But Google’s AI-powered search — a quite controversial feature — got it wrong as well. Its AI overview told me an NFL team was limited to one onside kick per game. It’s almost funny to not only get the information wrong, but to get it wrong with two different incorrect answers — though it appears the AI overview was different for other users.
Mashable reached out to Google for comment and will update the story if and when we receive a response.
A quite faulty result from Google search.
Credit: Screenshot: Google
Credit: Screenshot: Google
While this situation is relatively low stakes, it is a frightening representation of how quickly misinformation spreads online — especially with Google’s aid. Things move fast. It’s not just random people who get tripped up. For instance, a respected sports publication like Awful Announcing shared the wrong information, which, of course, would confuse more folks scrolling.
Credit: Screenshot: X
It’s not hard to imagine the person running Awful Announcing’s X account doing a quick Google, getting fed false info, then posting it. Ultimately Awful Announcing’s post was corrected — as were Google’s results — but the misinformation had already been spread.
Seasoned NFL reporters and even the guy who invented the new kind of kickoff were getting mixed up.
Granted, it does not help that the NFL has a way of making a terribly complicated rulebook. That opens avenues for human errors that trickle their way into Google’s results.
But do you know what else is complicated and ripe for human errors and fabrication? Politics. International conflict. Climate change. What happens when the familiar muscle memory of Googling can no longer be trusted?
As Mashable has covered in detail, Google search has run into numerous problems lately. The internet is flooded with low-quality content looking to answer common search queries. Court documents and reporting have suggested that perhaps Google has become more focused on ad dollars than reliable search results. And, let’s not forget, AI search overview’s rollout got a pretty disastrous response from the public. In total, it stands to reason that folks should double check anything they Google.
So yes, the rules of an NFL game aren’t terribly important in the grand scheme of things. But the ease with which bad information can spread via Google is much bigger than anything that happened between the Bucs and Ravens.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for March 1, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
Mixed metals.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
ALLOY
Hurdle Word 2 hint
A popular board game.
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Hurdle Word 2 Answer
CHESS
Hurdle Word 3 hint
The edge of the beach.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
COAST
Hurdle Word 4 hint
Milk-based.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
DAIRY
Final Hurdle hint
A Spanish character.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
TILDE
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on March 1
It’s a new month, and while the Moon may appear totally full, we’re still a couple of days away from this yet. But in the meantime, there’s still lots to spot on its surface.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, March 1, the Moon phase is Waxing Gibbous. According to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide, 94% of the Moon will be lit up tonight.
With just your naked eye, tonight you’ll be able to see the Mares Imbrium and Crisium, as well as the Tycho Crater. If you have binoculars hanging about, dust them off and pull them out to catch a glimpse of the Mares Nectaris and Frigoris, and the Endymion Crater. And proud telescope owners will see all this and more, including the Apollo 15 and 17 landing spots, and the Schiller Crater.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon will be on March 3. The last Full Moon was on Feb. 1.
What are Moon phases?
According to NASA, the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit the Earth. Over the course of this period, it moves through eight recognisable phases, what we call the lunar cycle. While the same side of the Moon always faces us, the amount of its surface lit by the Sun changes as it continues along its path. The shifts in sunlight create the different appearances we see from Earth, ranging from a fully illuminated Moon to a thin sliver or near darkness. The eight phases are:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
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Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
Men are paying to have negative posts removed from Tea app
As reported by 404 Media, online service Tea App Green Flags will scrub negative posts from anonymous gossip app Tea and similar online forums where women post about negative experiences they’ve had with men they’ve dated.
According to 404 Media’s interview with Tea App Green Flags’ founder, simply identified as Jay, the company launched two years ago to tackle posts on the many Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. His focus has turned to Tea in the past year.
“We just want to take down posts about people who are being defamed,” Jay told 404 Media. “And when I say defamed, it means like, ‘this guy has a small penis,’ or ‘this guy smells.’ That doesn’t fit the mission statement of what the Tea app was for, which is to warn women against people who are harmful, who are abusive, who are cheaters.”
Tea App Green Flags’ site claims to have removed over 2,500 posts from the Tea App for over 759 clients. Most of the service’s clients are men, although Jay noted that occasionally the wives and girlfriends of men posted on the app will reach out.
Prospective Tea App Green Flags clients must provide their name, age, location, and photo to the service, as well links to specific posts targeting them. According to Tea App Green Flags’ FAQs, they can only remove posts with direct references to a client. On average, the site says, a Tea App “takedown campaign” will take 21 – 30 days. The lengths of other takedowns depend on the platform.
Price-wise, it costs $1.99 to report one Tea account and up to $79.99 to report 25 of them. The company also offers “24/7 Reputation Monitoring,” which costs $19.99 per month and alerts clients when they appear on Tea or Facebook.
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Jay would not share the details of the takedown process with 404 Media. Tea does have a free form for takedown requests on its website, and says that it will “only reply to takedown requests submitted via the takedown portal.”
Jay emphasized to 404 Media that Tea App Green Flags does not extend its services to people who have been accused of sexual assault multiple times on Tea, or who have been accused by one person using their real name and photo in a Facebook group.
“Sometimes we find along the process that there are pedophiles or people who actually did what they did, and they’re very bad,” Jay told 404 Media. “So we say, ‘we’re not doing this.’ We can’t take a rap for that. We’re ethical. We just want to take down people who are being defamed.”
Tea markets itself as presenting “dating safety tools that protect women.” In July 2025, it was the target of a large-scale cyberattack that exposed thousands of user images including drivers’ licenses, leaving users vulnerable to doxxing and harassment. These images were provided as verification for accounts, although the app itself is otherwise anonymous.
Jay claimed to 404 Media that Tea’s anonymity “causes a cesspool of defamation,” and that he would prefer if women shared their faces, even if they are speaking out against dangerous men who have done them harm.
While Tea is meant to be a women-only app, Tea App Green Flags is proof of men’s infiltration of these online dating spaces. (Tea itself was founded by a man: Sean Cook.)
“I have a Tea app account. I’m a dude,” Jay told 404 Media. “All my reps have Tea app accounts. They’re men.”
Mashable has reached out to Tea for further comment.
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