BATON ROUGE — Wednesday on my 67th birthday with my wife out of town on business, my imagination ran wild.
But not too far and for too long. I get mentally exhausted loading a dishwasher.
What I did before my two dogs left me birthday presents in different parts of the house (“Surprise, it’s a birthday tootsie roll, Daddy!”) was wistfully ponder what life was like without social media.
It made me smile. For a millisecond.
And then I wondered how such a society-transforming communication tool instantly greenlighted unfiltered cruelty and flipped the “on” switch for 24-hour-a-day anger.
It erased the boundaries of simply being mean and advanced to the point of senselessness. School classroom shootings have now become shootings at high school athletic events. Friday Night Lights has become Friday Night Frights.
We’re doomed if a teenager can’t be safe in an innocent social setting like a high school football game. Does the tuba player have to be strapped with a semi-automatic rifle to finish a song? Are you supposed to train one of your cheerleaders to handle a bazooka.
Without social media, we lived in a kinder world where issues and differences were settled with civility and respectful discussions.
It was a more innocent universe that didn’t seem so hurried, so accelerated. Everything wasn’t so sudden because it didn’t have to be. When something happened, good or bad, it wasn’t in front of your face within seconds. There was time to digest, ponder and have a rational thought process.
Now, like last Saturday if you see a Colorado State football player deliver a vicious hit that sends a Colorado player to the hospital, you can quickly go to social media to find published cellphone numbers of the Colorado State player and his mother and the Colorado State player’s campus address and his family’s home address.
It gives you the option of making a death threat online, over the phone, or in person.
Isn’t technology wonderful?
I try hard to ignore the fact we now live in a society in which there has been a complete deterioration of the English language and basic grammar use. Nobody wants to read anything longer than a tweet. How can we expect them to understand the difference between their, there and they’re?
In my little plot of the planet having chronicled college sports for 44 years, the advent of social media in college athletics has proven to be mostly beneficial, but it’s also fraught with challenges.
Schools with the most money and resources employ innovative and imaginative social media departments that are marketing tools stretching beyond reaching just the average fan. The true purpose is extending all the way to recruits.
Ask LSU women’s head basketball coach Kim Mulkey if she could have turned a doormat program into NCAA national champions in just two seasons without steady exposure provided by a tireless social media department.
“We (LSU) have our own social media department and they’re off the charts,” Mulkey told me in mid-May. “They are literally so creative, young, and they’re into what they do.”
What they do is pump out a constant stream of tweets and videos. No doubt recruits have seen Angel Reese dancing in the dressing room or Flau’jae Johnson breaking out in a freestyle rap.
Recruits look at that and think, “That looks like fun. Plus, they’re winning championships and playing for a coach who embraces big personalities. I want to play THERE.”
Mulkey is an old-school soul who understands the value of social media, yet she played for a coach at Louisiana Tech (Leon Barmore) who was all business. He would have nipped at the bud any individual self-promotion by his players.
But having and growing a personal “brand” for a college athlete through social media to attract NIL money is the ultimate recruiting tool.
If you don’t think the rich get richer, there’s no better recruiting exposure than having Reese and LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne featured on the cover of the recent Sports Illustrated “Money Issue.”
The accompanying story pointed out the Tigers have four of the six female athletes ranked in the On3 top 100 in NIL evaluations – Dunne No. 3 at $3.2 million, Reese No. 8 at $1.7 million, Johnson No. 19 at $1.1 million and new basketball signee Hailey Van Lith No. 79 at $550,000.
How will Mulkey this season handle a player (Reese) who now drives a more expensive car (a Mercedes) than she does? Welcome to the new millennium of college coaching.
It’s probable most college coaches approaching or past 60 years old privately abhor social media on several fronts.
Coaches have to motivate players now making bank to play their best.
Coaches often sell their dignity when comes to the “anything goes” approach by using social media in recruiting. Dancing with recruits in videos is simply creepy. Watching LSU head football coach Brian Kelly getting jiggy with recruits is painful. Body parts are falling off.
Coaches assign a staff member to monitor the players’ social media accounts, hoping nothing inappropriate will pop up that will embarrass the player, the program, or the school.
It’s why I can’t imagine past Hall of Fame coaches, from human powder kegs like basketball’s Bobby Knight and football’s Woody Hayes, to basketball’s consummate team fundamentalist John Wooden, could survive in today’s social media tsunami.
If you think Knight could throw a courtside chair far, can you imagine him grabbing one of his player’s cell phones after discovering he made a social media post from the locker room after a game?
That player would be thrilled to tweet using the hashtag #Firstcellphoneorbitingearth.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com