Should You Tweet at Recruits: A Revision

The hardest thing about running a website — sports or otherwise — is coming up with ideas. It’s not the writing or the jokes or the stats or anything else that makes up a post. It’s the ideas. So when I think we have come up with a good one, it becomes easy to justify why we should publish it and difficult to talk myself out of.

Earlier today Kyle Boone wrote a post about why you should tweet at recruits. I thought about, edited and hit publish on that piece. I fundamentally disagreed with the end result (tweeting at high schoolers), but he made really good points and I’m a sucker for contrarian points of view like Mike Gundy is a sucker for 3-stars with long-limbed parents.

His primary premise was that if you tweet at recruits in a manner that is civil and positive then it can actually woo high school kids to various colleges. His takes were compelling, and I was in.

I deleted that post tonight.

I did not delete it because I disagreed with it — I was actually more excited than anyone else about publishing it. I did not delete it because Oklahoma State contacted us. I did not delete it because readers went bananas on both sides.

I deleted it because it was probably shortsighted of us to encourage the OSU fan base to do something that is pretty clearly an NCAA violation. Here is NCAA spokeswoman Kayci Woodley on this very thing a few years ago from the Oklahoman.

“Fans cannot contact a recruit and attempt to entice them to attend a certain school, as this is a violation of NCAA rules. If a school comes across an instance of this happening, it is expected they would reach out to those athletics personnel, fans and boosters and reinforce the ground rules related to communicating with recruits. This communication outreach would most likely be reported to the NCAA, which would show the school is doing their due diligence to abide by the NCAA rules.” [NewsOK]

There are many other public notes and stipulations on this subject, too.

And that reality was actually mentioned in the post, but it was something that I sort of shrugged off. I did not think it through very well in my edit — again, justifying ideas that you think are good regardless of whether they’re right. I didn’t consider it a big deal, even though it is. I ignored it because I wanted to, and in doing so I also ignored the triangular reader-media-university relationship that we have worked to build.

So I’m sorry for that. We don’t always get this stuff right, and we should not have framed that post like we did. We should not have encouraged that position or published that post. Not because of the reaction from fans and readers but because of the position it put us in with recruits, players and the beat we cover.

I’m also proud of Kyle Boone. He does a lot more for this site than just writing the words you see on your device. He has evolved into an excellent wordsmith, editor and idea-generator. There is no way this organization would exist in its current iteration without him or his work.

So yeah, that’s all I wanted to say. We messed up. I messed up. We are sorry. I am sorry. Thanks for reading PFB and working with us as we continue to try and build the best media organization that covers Oklahoma State athletics that we possibly can.