A coach can share an article, but he can’t tag the recruit.
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Endorsing meant coaches could like and favorite tweets. While some coaches have gone insane with the retweets like former Georgia coach Mark Richt, Vols coach Butch Jones, and South Carolina’s Will Muschamp, Auburn offensive line coach Herb Hand posted his “hot take” on the situation.
Earlier this week, ESPN.com also reviewed the negative side of the retweet/like rule, noting that “one coach retweeted a commit who was retweeting a porn star, pictures of recruits’ girlfriends were flooding programs’ official sport Twitter accounts and objectionable song lyrics and slang were all over the place”. But schools are limited to spending $100 on a charity donation – although they can provide “other reasonable tokens of support (eg flowers, card) in the event of the death of the prospective student-athlete or the death or life-threatening injury or illness of a member of the prospective student-athlete’s family”.
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. “I just think I have an obligation to the people around me and the people who helped me get to that position”. Twenty years ago, when Maryland coach D.J. Durkin was a high school senior and a football recruit in Boardman, Ohio, his only use of a phone was to make a call. Rapidly dying are the days of, “I hear they have this running back out in Eastern Montana we need to see”.
Coaches burned the midnight oil to take advantage of a new rule that went into effect Monday. Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin, to no surprise, seems to be having a little fun with the new rule, as well. “But for some it may affect them differently”.
It also allows coaches to publicly acknowledge when a player has received an offer or made a campus visit when previously those were essentially open secrets.
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Arkansas commitments and prospects had mixed emotions about the new rules. 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”. Just like the satellite camps.
