The Miami Hurricanes and Florida Gators don’t get along well on the football field and they certainly aren’t friendly when it comes to the cut-throat world of college football recruiting. The battles on the field and on the recruiting trail are well known.
However, one Hurricanes fan escalated things to a crazy level this week. Said fan nearly started an NCAA recruiting violations incident with one simple message board post on Rivals.com.
According to a report, the fan put out a message accusing the Gators of major recruiting violations just before national signing day next Wednesday. The story goes like this:
Things got started when someone posted on the Rivals message board that the Gators were facing serious trouble from the NCAA after a recruit recorded video of two Gators coaches offering him cash. The allegation — which was a troll job — got picked up and shared on Twitter, and then went viral.
That’s right, Twitter and those damn camera phones were going to come back to bite another team on the recruiting trail. However, the whole thing was a complete troll job and wasn’t sniffed out until it was far too late.
Apparently things were so well done on the troll job that Miami coaches even began reaching out to recruits about their commitment status with the Gators.
Things got so out of hand that the person who created the original post had to out themselves and make sure everyone knew the original post was fake. Said person took to Miami site Canes Insight and posted the following message:
Guys, this was a massive troll job executed to perfection by none other than myself. I posted this beauty on the Rivals Mainboard on Wednesday night. To be honest, I thought I was a rather obvious troll, but the @UGArecruiting twitter handle picked up my post and tweeted it out. That caused it to go viral, and now everyone is talking about it across multiple sites.
The Gators had to do serious damage control as a result of just this one rumor going viral, even having to swear up and down that this didn’t happen with personal calls to recruits.
Sadly, all people needed to do was some simple fact checking and the fakeness of the post would’ve been easy to recognize. It was as simple as noting that no player from Homestead High School was being recruited by Florida.
No seriously, it was that simple. The rumor would’ve been smoked out, but people will apparently buy anything happening in the world of college football recruiting.
“Fake news” isn’t just for politics folks, it’s hit college football recruiting now too. Well that and idiots on message boards always being idiots.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone — don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Seriously.
