Tennessee player tweets this a couple of days ago and finds he’s no longer on the team as of today.
Yeah, now that I think about it, that is funny.
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Category Archives: Social Media Is The Devil’s Playground
Lookin’ for love in all the right places
Jalen Ramsey, serious baller. No, make that mega-serious baller.
Jacksonville Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey had the most millennial way of messing with opponents back at Florida State … he’d make WRs think he was trying to bang their GFs.
“Say I was playing a big receiver at whatever school, I would look up his Instagram and slide in his girlfriend’s DMs before the game,” Ramsey said on the Bussin’ with the Boys podcast with Titans lineman Taylor Lewan and NFLer Will Compton.
And, would it work? Hell yeah it did — “People get hot about that.”
He’s lucky he didn’t get the crap beat out of him on the field for pulling that. But that doesn’t mean I’m not laughing my ass off over it.
(h/t)
Filed under Social Media Is The Devil's Playground
Phone tag
Food for thought:
I certainly wouldn’t deny his overall point about how social media affects public behavior (one of the striking things about attending the Masters is watching people spend the afternoon not glued to their phones), but I’m interested in what you think of his point about how it contributes to the decline in college football attendance. I can’t say I’ve observed an effect on tailgating; hell, it’s as much an event to show yourself off at to others as concert going is.
I do wonder if schools offering improved Wi-fi as an attendance inducement are wasting their time, though. If all you’re doing is coaxing people to show up who aren’t involved in the game, what’s the point?
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UPDATE: More food for thought.
“Coach, that’s entrapment.”
What do you wanna bet that Kliff Kingsbury wasn’t the only college head coach who’s done this?
New Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury made a lot of eyes roll when it was revealed this spring that he plans on giving his players regular “cell phone breaks” so they check in with family and friends or scour their favorite social media sites.
It’s something he allowed back in college when he was the head coach at Texas Tech and he said it not only helped break up the monotony of team meetings, it served as a way to improve his players’ attention.
Well, maybe there’s a secret reason why he’s letting his NFL players have the same privilege.
During an August 2016 appearance on “The HawkCast” podcast with then-Atlanta Falcons linebacker A.J. Hawk, Kingsbury openly revealed he and his Texas Tech coaches would set up fake social media accounts using “cute girls” as avatars to spy on their players.
That’s right, spy.
“We have fake accounts with cute girls that they add right now so we can see what’s going on, who’s tweeting what,” Kingsbury said at the time. “Those are heavily monitored, for sure.”
… When asked if he thought his players at Texas Tech might have been aware of the spying, Kingsbury told Hawk, “I think they do, but they can’t resist that. Friend requests from cute girls are an automatic follow.”
As the saying goes, it’s undefeated.
Filed under Social Media Is The Devil's Playground
The problem with SEC officiating, in two paragraphs
The league sees what you tweet. Vincent and Chuck Dunlap, the conference’s director of communication, are responsible for monitoring social media on Saturdays in the fall, identifying viral moments surrounding SEC football games. “Chuck might identify, ‘Twitter universe went crazy in Knoxville! What’s going on?’” Shaw says. This begins a process of evaluation that often results in Shaw crafting a statement that might never be published…
… And all SEC officials are part-timers; Shaw himself worked at BellSouth and then AT&T while he served as a head referee for 15 years. The day jobs for SEC refs range from teacher to salesman, from insurance agent to small business owner. The SEC pays its officials about $3,000 a game, Shaw says, but that number can vary.
So the conference feels sensitive enough about the job to track the real time social media outrage of every Tom, Dick and Bubba, yet pays its officials at a level that would make a rational human being question why bother doing a job that motivates the higher ups to track the real time social media outrage of every Tom, Dick and Bubba.
This is what you get when you leave the management of something important to a bunch of cheap bastards.
I saw it on the Internet, so it must be binding.
Andy Staples has a suggestion to fix college football recruiting. No, not this one: “I still believe that eliminating signing day entirely and allowing schools to sign players at any point in high school…”
Allow schools to publicize when they’ve offered a player a scholarship.
He offers several rationales for doing so which range from possibly relevant (“Some of them [schools] wouldn’t offer so many players”) to irrelevant (“No recruit would lie about getting an offer, either”).
There’s a third one that’s certainly well meaning, but I’m not sure how much real world effect it would have.
• It would turn up the heat on coaches who pull offers.
Go back and look at the Clemson offer that receiver Justyn Ross posted (and ultimately accepted). It’s full of disclaimers. He must qualify academically. He must continue to demonstrate good character. He must “continue to display the athletic characteristics consistent with a Clemson Tiger.” In other words, he must keep being good at football. Most scholarship offer letters—though not all social media offer graphics—contain this sort of language. And it’s perfectly understandable if a coach pulls an offer because a player is flunking classes or balloons to 400 pounds or knocks over a liquor store or waits to commit until the team has filled its allotment at the player’s position. What isn’t so understandable is when a player has an offer and commits months before signing day and then gets told there is no room for him in the class shortly before signing day. If the coach liked the player enough to post the scholarship and the player didn’t do anything that ran afoul of the disclaimers, the coach had better have a really good explanation for why he has no scholarship for the player. This could keep players from getting squeezed at the end of the process. [Emphasis added.]
In response to the highlighted portion of that, so what? Does anyone really think Bobby Petrino would care? What about any coach on the proverbial hot seat who has a chance to displace a three-star for a better option at the last minute?
Every once in a while, we hear about high school coaches who get ticked off at a college coach for ditching one of his kids at the last moment — Spurrier did it a few seasons ago and Smart did it a couple of years ago. I’m not sure how a school posting a scholarship offer publicly is going to shame a coach into sticking with it. Most coaches are pretty shameless when it comes to recruiting.
What are y’all’s thoughts?
Filed under Recruiting, Social Media Is The Devil's Playground
