If you follow a college football or basketball coach on Twitter, there's a good chance you've seen a predictable stew of retread Michael Jordan quotes and Bible verses suddenly replaced by retweets of high school kids you couldn't care less about.That's because on Monday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association began allowing college coaches to retweet recruits. Previously, coaches and schools were not allowed to publicly acknowledge athletes they were recruiting who had not yet signed letters of intent. The prohibition included social media.
The result of the rules change has been fairly ridiculous. For example, TCU football coach Gary Patterson retweeted 128 tweets from recruits on August 1 alone. Before that, he tweeted an average of four times per day. Patterson even went back and retweeted one recruit's seven tweets about TCU since April.
There are two things to know about this new rule. The first is that as annoying as the retweeting seems, it absolutely works. As much as we hate to admit it, we actually enjoy getting retweeted from people we respect. It makes us think better of them. And in this case, it also makes recruits think they're being noticed.Fitzgerald knows this first-hand. Last week, he accidentally blocked The Champaign Room, SB Nation's Illinois site. TCR understandably had some words for their rival coach:
Interaction with someone famous can change how we think of them. The same dynamic holds true for coaches and players—which means retweeting is good for coaches, even though it can be irritating and spammy for anyone else following their feeds.The second thing to know about this change, and about the ensuing RT frenzy, is that it's a hilarious and ridiculous reflection on the NCAA. Not to mention the economic restrictions the association places on college athletes.Think about it: the NCAA—which purportedly was founded to regulate player safety and supposedly exists to promote education—was in the business of policing Tweets. The association's member schools were (and remain) so paranoid about their on-field competitors and rivals gaining any sort of advantage that they were preventing schools from truthfully communicating with fans about whom they were recruiting.With the Tweet embargo lifted, RTs have essentially become currency. A way for schools and coaches to show interest. And why not? Rather than use cash offers to express how much they value athletes, like every other industry in the world, college programs are hitting the retweet button. It's silly and inefficient, to be sure—but then again, so is building lavish facilities and handing coaches megabucks contracts in order to attract the athletic talent you can't just pay directly.In prisons, inmates come up with alternate forms of payment: tobacco, street drugs, sexual favors, hits (that is, beating other people up), and above all, postage stamps. Yes, postage stamps. Which sounds almost as silly as RTs. Only it isn't, not really, because incarceration doesn't strip goods and services of value, no matter what the rules say.NCAA amateurism works the same way. The association, its supporters, and various status quo shills can pretend talented athletes don't have any value beyond the artificially-fixed price of a scholarship—heck, they can even pretend college athletes aren't worth that much. Meanwhile, what coaches and programs actually do—from enthusiastic notes to under-the-table payments to no-enticement-spared recruiting visits—tells another, more realistic story. Retweeting recruits is new, but the reason behind it is anything but. The high schoolers are coming for your timeline, and until college sports joins the rest of the payment-for-labor world, they're likely here to stay.Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.
ONE EMAIL. ONE STORY. EVERY WEEK. SIGN UP FOR THE VICE NEWSLETTER.
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.
