Any time a college football recruit tweets out news of a scholarship offer by some school or another, people tweet back in droves, urging him to pick that school or a different one.
An Iowa State football coach tweeted and deleted criticism of a recruit announcing an Iowa offer
It’s probably no big deal, but here’s a light sprinkling of Midwestern offseason rivalry zest.
Photo by David Purdy/Getty Images
There are entire genres of guys who tweet at recruits, ranging from the deceptively positive “I hope you make the right decision, but that decision should be to come to my school” bro to the guy who wants the recruit to know his school has the best academic program in the recruit’s field of study. Most of these are just regular dudes killing time at home or at work.
Rarely does an active college football coach wind up in a recruit’s post-offer mentions. But on Tuesday, after an Iowa recruit tweeted out his offer, a wild Iowa State staffer appeared:
Jake Karchinski, a three-star defensive end from Wisconsin, did what legions of recruits do every day: He tweeted about an offer and enclosed some of the first few Google image search results he found when he tweeted “Iowa football” or something.
Iowa State senior offensive analyst Jim Hofher tweeted a short time later, tagging the recruit’s and some media/recruiting service types’ Twitter handles: “Welp..... that’s OK... have seen him competitively and was underwhelmed, as you know.” The tweet has since been deleted, probably because it was never supposed to exist. Maybe it was intended as a private direct message. Either way, it was a little embarrassing, and now it’s gone.
The NCAA has rules about the kind of comments schools can make about recruits. If Iowa State were recruiting Karchinski, Hofher’s tweet might force the Cyclones to stop. Teams aren’t allowed to comment on a recruit’s skill level before they’ve actually signed that recruit, and Hofher’s apparently mistaken tweet definitely commented on the kid’s ability.
But it doesn’t even seem like Iowa State’s recruiting this player, based on a) the coach’s view of his talent, and b) scans of the player’s Twitter page and some recruiting services. So it’s likely that this story ends here. We’ve all deleted bad tweets before.
This one is mainly funny in the context of Iowa and Iowa State fans beefing on Twitter all the time, on everything from football to their respective campuses and agricultural exploits. It’s also funny if you’re the kind of person who thinks a recruit’s offer by Iowa pretty much ends any chance he’d ever go to Iowa State, anyway.
And who knows? Maybe Karchinski will wind up playing for the Hawkeyes. If he does, he can use the brief existence of this tweet as motivation for the 2019 playing of ¡El Assico!
