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Back in 2004 on Feb. 4, something happened which changed the course of modern humankind.
Mark Zuckerberg founded something called Facebook. At the time, Facebook was genius. It started out I think as needing a .edu e-mail address to be on it, so it seemed less creepy than MySpace. It was a built-in filter to keep the majority of creeps, weirdos, and kids who shouldn’t be on social media off social media.
Eventually, it morphed into what it is today, which is pretty much a haven of creeps, weirdos, and kids who shouldn’t be on social media. At any rate, it was the beginning of the end of not knowing what high school kids were doing at all hours of the day whether you wanted to or not, and thus was probably a defining date in some abstract way in how big college football’s National Signing Day (NSD) has become. Give high school or college students a forum to have their voices heard, chaos will ensue.
And so this Feb. 4, National Signing Day happens 11 years to the day of that Facebook founding, and as such, we’ll be treated to all the smoldering takes, over-the-top event self-promotions, and immediate interactivity with where teenagers are choosing to go to college. It’s absurd, to be honest.
So in order to make your NSD experience in 2015 a pleasurable one, here are a few rules that everyone should be following:
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1. Don’t Tweet at recruits. Ever. Like … NEVER: This is an annual reminder of sorts, because for every 500 people who choose not to Tweet recruits, there are five idiots either anonymously or otherwise who don’t get the message. It’s not cool, it never has been cool, and it never will be cool. Think … Jordache gear.
It goes without saying that some of the worst society can show of itself happens when teenage kids are harassed on social media for their college choices. Even if you’re not being mean with it and just Tweeting a welcome to (insert fan school name here), still, DON’T DO IT.
It’s weird. Some 18-year-old doesn’t think it’s cool when some middle-aged dude is telling him how excited he is to have that player on campus. As with most things, the rules get bent a little bit if you’re an attractive female. They play by a different set of rules than everyone, always have, and that’s just life. The sooner you accept that fact, the easier things become.
2. Classes matter; individual players not so much: In the BCS and now College Football Playoff era, no team has won a championship without having multiple top-10-ranked classes on its roster somewhere (per Rivals — it’s way easier to read than the other ones). So when folks say that star rating is “overrated” or whatever, they’re wrong. Now, it’s important to note that overall good classes are needed, not individual 5-star players. So tap the breaks a bit when 5-star Freddie from Florida takes his running back talents to your school. It’s a nice piece, but plenty of 5-stars flame out. If your team is recruiting top-10 classes, congrats, you’ve got a shot.
Of course, the system is a bit rigged from the jump. A player whom no one knows about and is a “2-star” player gets offered by a few big names. All of a sudden, he jumps up to a 4-star player and thus the class for that team looks better. However, the overall math of top classes and champions bears out the logic.
3. Spare the world your hot takes on how players announce their decisions: Stuff becomes popular because people somewhere like it in high volume. Yes, Justin Bieber’s music is terrible in my opinion, but enough people like it to make it popular. Recruiting, NSD, and players announcing in all weird manner of ways that are a bit self-indulgent are as popular as they are because people, somewhere, cannot get enough.
Life is pretty simple in the sense that other than a select few things, if you don’t like something, don’t sit there, expose yourself to it, and complain about it. You always have the option to not watch a certain program, listen to certain music, or read certain websites. People continually complaining about the same thing being insufferable and then continually going back to it is way more insufferable than the actual thing they dislike anyway. If you don’t care for it, don’t watch. I personally choose not to watch all the stuff.
4. Mocking kids’ decisions is bad, bad news, man: Stuff like, “Jimmy Quarterback told our coaches he was worried about academics and then he flips to (insert rival school here, because every school thinks their rival basically is a giant room full of coloring books and letter blocks while their own campus is the Harvard of whatever region they’re in). LOL” is annoying.
Somewhere, that’s a teenage kid and his family having just made one of the paramount decisions of their lives that will forever affect them all. Whether or not he’s scoring touchdowns for you pretty much doesn’t matter a lick in the grand scheme of things.
5. Lastly, take yourself back to 17-18: This is true of most things, but if you can just imagine what you would have been like with a bunch of cameras wanting to show up for three minutes just so you could discuss where you were going to college to play a sport, you’d probably do some pretty juvenile stuff too. All in all, most of this is pretty tame considering all things. Late teenage years are as much for mistakes as they are for sound decision making. High schoolers are smart enough to love the exaggeration, the spotlight, and live it up … and too green to understand that low key sometimes is the best way to get into the house in the end. In other words, we all probably did some dumb stuff in our late teenage-early 20s years, so let’s put ourselves in those shoes rather than act like we were perfect and not self-indulgent at the time. It’s okay. It’s all in good fun.
And with that, I’d like to announce that I am committing to going to bed, though “eating dessert” made a pretty late push and “going for a jog” had zero chance, but never knew it.
