Do You Love Free Burritos? Well This NBA Finals Is For You

(Yahoo Finance) – Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) announced today it’s dishing out up to one million dollars of free burritos through the rest of the professional basketball season. Free throws. Free agent. Cutting away to get free. All of this means free burritos. Every time an on-air announcer says the word “free” during the official coverage of the men’s professional basketball championship series, Chipotle will be “freeting”: live Tweeting a unique code good for the chance to score a free burrito from @chipotletweets.

Each mention of “free” in the first half of each game results in up to 500 free burritos. Each mention of “free” in the second half results in up to 1000 free burritos. Viewers and Tweeters will need to be on the offense as the code will only be valid to the first 500 (in the first half) or 1000 (in the second half) mobile users to text the correct code to 888222. Ordinary text and data rates will apply. The promotion will be limited to the first 20 on-air mentions of “free” during each game.

This promotion is not affiliated with or authorized, endorsed or sponsored by the National Basketball Association, any of its affiliates or any NBA team or personnel, or Twitter. The use of any trade name or trademark of the National Basketball Association or Twitter is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association.

Mentions of “free” must be from the principal play-by-play announcer, color commentator, or sideline reporter on the official broadcast television network of the games.

First off, very funny that Chipotle can’t say the words “NBA Finals” since they are not an official sponsor. That reminded me of when Woj was tweeting around the NBA draft selections without actually stating it as fact. Anyways, on the surface this seems like a cool idea to get people to be talking about you without having to spend any of the actual money to be a real sponsor with the league. A no brainer too since both Kawhi and Kevin Durant are going to be free agents and will be talked about 10000000 times. Or maybe how Steph snuck “free” for a three, either way that word is going to be used a shit ton in this series let alone 20 times.

Which is why on the surface this seems like a great idea, but one of those that once it gets put into practice ends up being a complete disaster. I’m sure there’s some super smart algorithm or something, but how are they going to determine the first 500 and first 1000 people to participate? I know everything is timestamped, but not to the second. What if there are people so submit at the exact same moment? Then what. I feel like there are going to be tons of people who get the short end of the stick and you can’t fuck with people when it comes to free food. At the same time no press is bad press and at least people will be talking about Chipotle which is all that matters.  I’d also be worried about some fishy business from the broadcast crew. You don’t think Marc Jackson wants some free burritos? Of course he does. A free Chipotle burrito is definitely nothing to sneeze at. I could see a situation where he has someone on the inside all ready on his phone to hit send, he’ll drop the ‘free’ and boom mama goes that man all the way to Chipotle to get down on his free burrito.

I also haven’t seen anywhere if this applies to a burrito bowl which is unfortunate because everyone knows that’s the play when you go to Chipotle. If I’m getting something for free there’s a general understanding that I am expecting to be able to take full advantage and there’s no way around the fact that a bowl gives you more food. I’m sure you could just tell the person you want that burrito in a bowl but then you’re going to be getting less free food which is bullshit.