Earlier this week, the NBA was caught up in one of the weirder (read: dumber) moments in recent free-agent memory, as the Duplicitious DeAndre Jordan spurned the Dallas Mavericks to remain with his current team, the Los Angeles Clippers.
If you're not aware of how the whole thing worked out and have a high tolerance for grown men acting like teenagers, you should do yourself a favor and read about it because it is hilarious and stupid. The fifteen cent version is that the Clippers approached Jordan about staying and kept him off the radar long enough for Twitter to explode and Mark Cuban to allegedly drive forlornly around Houston screaming at the heavens for some sign of a starting center with great defensive presence in the paint.
A lot about this story is tempered with the word "allegedly," because no one, not Jordan or the Clippers or the media or Mark Cuban wants to own up to how childish and it all actually is. I like to imagine that Chris Broussard had a fleeting moment of self-reflection where he thought "Wait. What am I actually doing with my life? WHAT HAVE I BECOME?" and then immediately stuffed that feeling way down deep inside where the sad things go.
It's an interesting story to us as college football fans, because as a story it sits juuuussstt on the edge of amusing and depressing, a line that we stand on every year as recruiting season rolls around. We want the inside info, but we also don't want to know too much, lest it damage how we look at players and coaches. And then we have to know regardless. We know the pizza is too hot, but it's pizza dammit and we're gonna eat it anyway!
It's kind of hard to know where to draw the line. Secret visits and intrigue are generally fair game for us to gawk at with a free conscience. Isaiah Prince, for example, caused a not-insignificant amount of gleeful consternation among Buckeye fans with a whole lot of implied subterfuge going on between Meyer and Nick Saban. That recalled the whole Trey DePriest saga, and going even further back, Seantrel Henderson (who, as much as we liked to make fun of for being stuck in Miami and not playing well, started all 16 games at tackle for the Bills last season). AL.com pointed this out yesterday:
Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer convinced Billy Sims to get out of town and hide for a few days so no other school could find and sign him. Former Mississippi State coach Rocky Felker used to tell me stories of putting assistant coaches in front of recruits' homes with the strict instructions to not let any other school in the door. There are other stories of two coaching staffs descending on a recruit's home in Mississippi at the same time, resulting in a brawl in the front yard.
It's probably for the better that coaches aren't allowed to do some of that stuff now, but it would be amazing in this social media world we now live in. Can you imagine someone live-tweeting or Periscoping Alabama coaches preventing Auburn coaches from entering a recruit's home? Or if a top recruit just disappeared around National Signing Day because a coach told him to?
HECK, LET'S FIND OUT!
To be clear, it's never not creepy to obsess over the whims of teenagers making a personal choice, but, loving sausage, we want to see how it's made as long as the manufacturing process isn't too gross. And it does get too gross at times.
What happened with the recruitment and commitments of Alex Anzalone and Malik McDowell were both public and unfortunate. In Anzalone's case, he had to deal with something that no one should ever have to consider period, to say nothing of it happening during what should've been one of the best moments of his life. And McDowell had to endure having a family dispute brought into the light and dissected from every possible angle by people much more interested in who their favorite teams' starting running back was going to be, instead of what would be the best decision for a high school senior faced with a very difficult choice.
So yes, if the really dumb and COMPLETELY FAKE AND MADE UP (I cannot reiterate enough how fake and made up these Tweets are, mostly because I don't need both Meyer and Gene Smith mad at me. Fake Urban I'm less concerned about) story that I've just laid before you happened, it would be incredible and we'd talk about it forever and ever. And to be fair, it's a lot easier and justifiable to laugh at grown adult millionaires making fools of themselves on a national stage. We will always eat this stuff up, because of the intersectionality of our favorite sport and a really goofy story.
We just need to know where to pump the brakes on our rabid desire for recruiting minutiae, for the sake of protecting kids who don't deserve to have the full weight of the internet come crashing down on their heads because of how one of their decisions ends up shaking out.
Like grown-ass adult DeAndre Jordan, these kids are free to make their own choices based on whatever the hell they feel like, and the real laughs and scorn should be reserved for the people who make themselves look silly chasing after them.
But then sometimes a kicker releases a commitment video with him doing a LeBron slow motion airplane thing, and, well...
