Yes, yes my friends I have read Ramzy's multiple stories on why you never tweet a recruit and I still did it anyway. But please don't hate me; I tell this story as a cautionary tale for future Buckeye twitter users. This is my sad, sad, story.
A few years ago a top OSU target sent out an innocent tweet. Something like "Keep on grinding" or "Nothing gonna stop me now", the sort of boring mushy inspirational quotes sent out by recruits and athletes hundreds of times a week. I clicked on the tweet and saw someone had sent a nasty comment to this recruit. He said something like "hey bro you're straight trash and won't ever amount to anything". I remember thinking "What a dick! I'm gonna let him know how much of a jerk he is! plus it's not like I'm a actually tweeting at the recruit, I'm just tweeting at a guy who is tweeting at a recruit. That's completely different". So I did the unthinkable. For the first time I was going to join into a conversation with a recruit....And I made a total ass of myself...
I told the jerky guy he was a complete loser and an idiot. I told him he needed to get a life and stop messing with a bunch of innocent high school kids who were making one of the the hardest decision of their lives. SEND. I felt pretty good about myself. I had told that guy off and showed the recruit how compassionate and understanding our fan base was at the same time. Our fan base would never let someone mess with him like that.....
A few minutes later I received a response from the guy I had just insulted, and my jaw hit the floor. The "random jerk" replied to me saying that he was one of the recruits best friends and high school teammates and I needed to mind my own business.....I checked his account....he wasn't lying. I had just insulted one of the best friends of a top recruit. I felt like a total idiot. I didn't mean to. I sent another message apologizing and saying I didn't know they were just joking with each other. I still felt embarrassed and a minute after I sent my apology I deleted my tweets, hoping the whole thing would just disappear. The recruit's friend must have felt the same because less than five minutes later all of the tweets in the conversation were gone. There probably were less than ten people in the world who noticed the whole incident, but I knew...and the friend knew....and worst of all, the recruit knew.
Imagine how bad I felt a few months later when 6'6, 245lb and #1 TE in the country, Chris Clark, committed to Michigan.
Chris' career hasn't panned out the way may imagined he would. After initially committing to North Carolina, he then committed to Michigan...and then UCLA...and then left UCLA after 2015 and finally ended up at Pitt.
I don't feel like my tweet was the deciding factor in his recruitment, but I still managed to make an ass of myself and I felt embarrassed for a long time afterwards.
Long story short: Don't tweet recruits. Don't tweet people who tweet recruits. Don't tweet about recruits. Just don't. Don't.
