Khalil Tate's 10 Word Tweet Singlehandedly Changed The Head Coaching Hire For Arizona
PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — One tweet, 10 words: “I didn’t come to Arizona to run the triple-option.”
One tweet, one purposeful and poignant tweet from a football player who three months earlier was an unknown backup on a struggling team, changed the way they do business at University of Arizona and laid the groundwork for similar change elsewhere in college sports.
Years from now we may look back at that moment in January when Arizona quarterback Khalil Tate tweeted out those 10 words that essentially torpedoed Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo’s candidacy as the Wildcats’ new coach—and eventually led to Kevin Sumlin’s hire—as the beginning of innovative change in the way college sports operate.
This is kind of a weird one when it comes to forming an opinion. I mean the old school part of me hates it. Despises it. College kids dictating their coaching hires by unleashing mobs on social media. And all the praise Tate is getting for it as a revolutionary and a hero for college sports – slippery slope when you start letting the players influence all their coaching hires, especially through Twitter. I wish I could change my boss by tweeting. I wish I could get this piece of shit Feitelberg fired so I could rip the divider down and complete my megadesk. But I’m an employee and don’t always get my way if the people above my paygrade don’t want it.
A paradigm shift may be coming in the way athletes and universities view their complex relationships. The days of players being excluded from key university decisions that affect them may be on the verge of a dynamic detour.
“I want our student-athletes to have a voice,” says Arizona president Dr. Robert Robbins. “I want them to be disruptive problem solvers.”
But the rational side of me kind of thinks it makes sense, and the arguments are sound. Tate is the one that’s going to be playing there. He’s gonna be the one in charge of the offense. He’s gonna be the one busting his ass taking blindside hits and bleeding for his team while also trying to ensure his future in the NFL. Not to mention the slimy way coaches just bounce around team to team whoever offers them the biggest paycheck, with no care in the world about loyalty to the players they recruited.
The superstar player takes a stand, a willing university proactively responds. Tate’s explanation of those indispensable minutes that started it all is as revealing as it is refreshing.
“I knew exactly what I was doing when I tweeted that out,” Tate told Bleacher Report. “I don’t do Twitter. When I tweet something, I download the app, tweet, then delete the app from my phone. So when I tweet, it’s important.”
“I had to make sure I was heard, make sure the team was heard, because my teammates didn’t want to run the triple option, either,” Tate continues. “So the idea was to tweet it out, let it get traction, then delete it. I knew people reading it would say, ‘Why did he delete it?’ But that just magnifies it more.”
Says Robbins: “I saw it, and I thought, wow, man, the power of social media.”
Also, if you remember, Tate became a Heisman candidate through running…the triple option.
He just doesn’t want to take the hits anymore.
…He didn’t want to run Niumatalolo’s triple option, but he ran the read option to near perfection in 2017 for the Wildcats—making a meteoric rise from backup to Heisman Trophy candidate in only 10 games. But the triple option is more dangerous, he says. The quarterback takes more hits in what is almost exclusively a ground-oriented attack.
So he changed it with 10 words on his Twitter account.
If it’s not something schools want to let happen…then they shouldn’t listen. They’re the adults and the people paid to make decision for the best of the team and the school. They don’t have to acquiesce to every demand their players make just because they get a lot of hearts and retweets. But if Arizona wanted to keep their star QB happy and give him an offense he’s comfortable with, so much so that they ditched their top job candidate and went with Sumlin instead, I mean, maybe it will be for the best.
I think I’ll withhold final judgement until I see how Arizona ends up this year.