Creepy Georgia Fan Calls Recruit, Twitter Sprains Itself In Rush To Soapbox

Contact between fans and recruits is nothing new. For decades, fans have seen a top player at their local high school game on a Friday night and said things like “Hey recruit, GO DAWGS!,” or “Hope to see you score touchdowns just like that in Athens next year!”

And there’s really nothing sinister with that, NCAA rules aside. It’s occurring at a football game, in a public setting, etc.

Calling a recruit, however, is a very different thing. It involves an invasion of privacy that encouraging a recruit to come to your school in public after a high school game does not.

It’s an NCAA violation. It’s creepy. And it shouldn’t happen. But it did last week, apparently.

According to this report by the AJC, an overzealous UGA fan called Georgia defensive back commitment Steven Nelson, and chatted with him for 5-10 minutes about whether he had switched his commitment to Texas Tech (as had been rumored), told him he was an excellent player, and then wished him well.

Then the fan bragged about what he’d done on Twitter and Rivals.com, a recruiting site.

Stop it.

Your love for your school won’t make the recruit choose it. In fact, it might creep the kid out so much that he doesn’t choose your school. Remember, the coaches are already selling everything possible about the school to the kid. They’re doing it in a polished, professional way. Your help is not needed. It can also cause quite the headache for a school’s compliance staff.

We recruiting analysts also have a vested interest in fans not calling recruits. If recruits start to receive a lot of phone calls, they’re going to be less willing to pick up the phone than they already are, particularly if the reporter’s number isn’t. Keeping track of which numbers belong to reporters and which belong to creepy fans obtaining the player’s number by claiming to be a reporter and then calling the recruit to sway him to their school is not something they need on their plate.