How SMU Football Monitors Recruit Twitter Accounts

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You have to assume every single college team in America does this same exact thing, but it’s pretty cool/funny to see exactly how it all goes down. Some assistant or intern just sitting on Twitter.com clicking Command-R, Command-R, Command-R on some 17 year old’s homepage jotting down notes for every tweet, retweet, favorite and follow. “September 17th, 9:14 PM, recruit retweets ‘WorldStarHipHop’ with ‘Vine’ media of chubby kid dancing as adults cheer him on, with text ‘Oooh, kill em (sic)’ and 7 skull face emojis (red line through 7) 8 skull face emojis.” What a job.

And they SHOULD all be monitoring social media as closely as they possibly can – Twitter is the new biggest threat your program. Seriously with how incompetent the NCAA’s investigatory arm is you pretty much have a 50/50 shot of getting away with any classic violations like handing out money and cars etc. But with Twitter? With everybody with a smart phone having it glued to their face constantly hitting refresh? You could say something stupid and delete it in literally 20 seconds, that thing will be screenshotted, viral and on every blog within the hour, and ESPN 3 hours later. There are no take-backs on the internet anymore.

If I were a college coach I’d wake up at night with cold sweats having nightmares about what my recruits and players were tweeting about. All it takes is one drunken “send” of 140 characters to throw an entire program into turmoil.