http://footballscoop.com/news/reminder/
When I turned on Twitter this morning my first thought at seeing the official HokiesFB account retweeting recruits and commitments was they had been hacked. But no it turns out it's allowed. This is going to be interesting and potentially really annoying. At least the staff was on top of it and started doing it at 12:01 as soon as rules allowed. If you don't like seeing all of that may I suggest turning off retweets.
How do you feel about following recruits on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and whatever app was just invented in the last five seconds?
Well, beginning Monday, that useless information could become amplified through your respective feeds five or tenfold.
Forums:
DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.
Comments
The wild west is about to get more wild.
So that whole "never tweet at recruits" chart is out the window.
1) it's a slippery slope 2) it's annoying to see 3) a coach or team is going to retweet a player who has something else on their feed that's either racist, sexist or illegal this bringing into question said coach or teams judgment 4) what does it do?
Because the #1 rule still holds true. Don't tweet at recruits.
People always say this, but someone has to. Recruits like attention from fan bases. Shocking but true. I get why its discouraged, but as long as you give vague go Hokie stuff, its harmless.
You're not wrong, but the moment you tell people they SHOULD tweet at recruits, the worst kind of people start doing it. This leads to overreactions and direct bashing of 17 year olds on the Internet, which nobody wants to deal with.
No no one
, it really is a choice.
Because it's creepy when a bunch of old men are trying to connect with a 17 year old? I just think it's fucking weird.
Dammit Pete
That account ain't Pete.
Dammit Twitter
I'm already annoyed.
Gotta turn off the retweets.
Good lord. I'm turning off the twitter machine today.
Just turn off retweets.
I just did. Much better.
I did not know I could do that. So much better.
This way you still get timely info but don't get spammed by "had a great visit to Virginia Tech University"
...which is much better than "University of Virginia Tech."
I will be creating the recruiting thread tomorrow as jugs was a little busy liking and re tweeting until 2-3ish in the morning.
PS this months thread will be YUGE....
Gotta do this to keep up. It definitely doesn't benefit us to be the only ones not to do this, just turn off retweets for HokiesFB. I don't particularly like it, but if Harbaugh and Dabo are favoriting/retweeting all our big recruits tweets, giving them a sense of personal acknowledgment (even though their accounts are almost always team-ran by the coach and several assistants) while we stay silent. It's a minor thing but could be the difference in winning a recruit in the odd world of attempting to sell your program to 16-18yr olds.
Which is exactly illustrative of how absurd this entire process has gotten. If a recruit is deciding on whether or not to go to a given college based on the number of RT/faves/likes that some damn social media post got, then the entire system is a failure. It's dependent upon attention, ego stroking, and overall shallowness. No longer does academic integrity, coaching staff qualities, and development as a person matter at all. It's all about the glamour of the process.
I don't disagree that talented kids should enjoy their recruitment. Schools put on a great show when these kids are in town. That's part of the fun. But seriously, if social media is the deciding factor, what does any of it mean?
I agree, I think the kids should have their moment and be able to enjoy their recruitment, but I think it has bred into some players taking on a very celebrity-ish take on the whole process. I don't know for sure, but some stuff from recruitniks on twitter leads me to believe that a recruit held a press conference over the weekend to... commit to play for his high school during the season, but set it up as if he was making a commitment decision.... -_-
It's totally getting out of hand, but at this point, the only thing that will fix it is more ridiculous things happening that will make people realize they need to pull back the reins a little.
Yeah, I'm thinking we're rapidly approaching a critical point, where something really ridiculous will happen that makes a lot of people re-think the process. But until someone with clout, like a group of conference commissioners or top coaches (think Saban, Meyer, etc.) start pushing back on how it's going, nothing will change. Once recruiting budgets become so exorbitant that they become a limiting factor on an entire program, expect the ADs to start the movement to pull back on the recruiting process.
Recruiting has always been about attention and ego stoking even in the days before social media. It's always been about how much the coach is contacting them, how much they want them, how they are treated like celebrities on their visits, and, for some, how much they can get in free stuff from the school. It's always been about being told how important the recruit is, how good they are, how Team A can get them to the NFL and make money that they've never had before. That fire has always been burning. Social media has just thrown gasoline on it and caused more people to get involved in the bidding wars.
Sure, but at least it was always about selling a vision. How the recruit can progress, develop, showcase skills towards getting an NFL paycheck, and get an education to benefit him later in life. If the situation becomes, "which school's coaches/recruiting Twitter accounts/students gave me the most RTs" then the whole process is lost.
No one is saying its the deciding factor. Its just another plus to have.
When Josh Sweat visited and we got him a coke can with his name on it, do you think they did it because they thought it would be the deciding factor? In that case why do it? Who wants a kid that makes his decision based on a coke can? Whats the difference between that and some social media retweets. Little things add up in recruitment. I don't understand why fans get upset about the attention recruits get. They're kids. They aren't old men that think about things the way old men think.
I was replying directly to Chris' hypothetical:
Odds of Twitter mentions/attention being a deciding factor? Probably small overall. But to me, if it does happen even once, it's absurd. At least custom made gear/tokens shows some effort by the school and coaches that they care. Twitter attention takes less than two seconds, and if that actually matters to someone in a way that will shape their entire future, I don't know what to say.
The recruiting process is and always has been absurd. But it is what it is, and that's college football.
And if a kid does make his decision based on the number of RTs who cares. That kid would have made his decision based on something equally stupid before twitter.
You're thinking about it from a purely logical position, but that's not how decision making works. No one is sitting there counting retweets and comparing them to other schools and explicitly saying that's what is going to make a difference. But every recruit is thinking about their personal relationship with a coach or staff. They're thinking about how much a staff wants them. They're thinking about the intangible good feelings they get from the idea of a given school that is based on positive personal interactions, attention given, and the like. People interact on social media and so little things like retweets and favorites become a very small fraction that gets blended into all of those things that ultimately do make a difference.
I could not have said this any better myself and I agree with this 100%
Pretty much a microcosm of society as a whole these days.
Sadly, yes.
I can't believe people would rate themselves on how they're seen on a social media site...
**searches frantically for just the right emma gif for this post so as to garner maximum turkey legs**
Ugh... et tu @CoachFuente ? Looks like we'll be playing 'disable retweet' whack-a-mole this week.
I've turned off 4 accounts so far today. Who's next?
Apparently Bud is.
Sure the retweet flood that is happening is inconvenient or annoying right now (easy fix, turn off retweets for that account) but for those who like to follow recruiting and don't want to pay for a subscription-based recruiting service, this could be awesome in the future. I will know almost immediately when offers are going out or when visits are happening for FREE from an official account.
Read title. Think
Click in, read first few comments...
I thought it either had to be a new commitment or this:
This is just the natural progression of what has been the industry standard for decades. In the 90's you had colleges flooding the postal service with letters to recruits, and now you just have them flooding their twitter, facebook, instagram, snapchat, etc.
The only difference I see between that and what we have now is that what we have now is far more instantaneous and a lot more public than it was before. But hey, that's just a product of the internet and social media age in which we live. But I don't really find it that ground breakingly bad compared to what it was before, its just that now we all get to see it exposed for what it is.
Agreed. Nothing to get worked up about just a new medium.
I read the title of this thread like it was straight out of the Saved By the Bell theme