OMG! Jim Harbaugh just RT me! (insert some sort of emoji).
As of Monday morning, social media and college sports just got a whole lot more nuts.
The NCAA is now allowing coaches to retweet, repost, and “favorite” recruits’ Tweets, but stopped short on actual interaction … which in and of its own right is completely crazy. If you’d have said 20 years ago this is where we’d be, we’d have been slapped upside the head by someone saying, “favorite isn’t a verb, you idiot.”
There’s no good answer here for the NCAA. Social media is how people interact anymore, which is entirely scary. The USA Today reported a few years ago that a ghastly and shocking one third of new marriges anymore start online. That’s terrifying.
So the NCAA had no choice but to eventually address it. The easy play would have been, “don’t interact with them, ever,” but as e-mail and yes, even texting, become more antiquated at the alter of social media, you have no option but to address how it interacts with recruiting.
Sites have popped up all over that allow athletes to create social media profiles to interact with other athletes and help get themselves recruited. The game has changed completely in how you get yourself in front of eyeballs. Rapidly dying are the days of, “I hear they have this running back out in Eastern Montana we need to see. Let’s head out there for a look.”
The downside, of course, is that the gray area with this is immense. For one, someone responding to a Retweet of a recruit is automatically going to lurch the coach’s account in with the student-athlete unless that person purposely deletes one name or the other.
If the coach responds to that fan, but the player is tagged in it because they were part of the initial conversation, is that an interaction with the player since it’s a direct Tweet the player is involved in?
Many accounts at that level are handled in part by low level staffers. If that’s the case, are there any different rules when they’re maintaining the account?
Lastly, coaches are human beings, albeit at the highest levels, human beings well paid to coach a game. They need breaks, too, and this only enhances the year-round obsession that has become “recruiting.” If Mark Richt and Clay Helton are both recruiting the same player, and Helton is on vacation when some five-star recruit Tweeting happens tagging them both and only Richt can capitalize, is that a fair advantage?
On the upside, the NCAA had to address social media usage at some point. It will only continue to be a fly in the ointment that needs to be dealt with.
But make no mistake … this is yet another headache for coaches and more red tape on a rule book that feels thicker than Vermont. #Yikes.
