“Blessed To Receive An Offer From…”
It’s always funny when an innocuous tweet you send out causes football Twitter to lose it’s mind, at least temporarily with the following tweet:
I’ve always felt weird about the phrase-ology of commitment tweets and posts for a number of reasons.
Of course, I am happy for any young person who gains traction and gets to play college football for another four years. It’s a long and lonely road going through college, in general, and then infinitely more complicated when you add football and corona into the mix to account for.
My hat goes off to any family and player who is successfully navigating this process!
College football recruiting has changed rapidly in the past decade and a half since I played too. Twitter had just come out as an app my senior year of high school and the NCAA had no regulations guiding the use of Facebook or Twitter for recruiting. So, largely, recruiting in 2008 remained emails, phone calls and in person visiting.
I don’t even think the word “offer” was in my cognitive vocabulary at the time. All I remember was stopping by the football office on a tour of Hartwick College (D3 NY), shaking our 6ft 8 head coach Mark Carr’s hand as he said, “So, you’re coming? Great. See you in August.” And, that was basically it.
For the top 2% of recruits today, however, you can follow their recruiting journey with cool hype graphics, read every handwritten note a coach has sent them (because they posted a picture of it) and join in their live Twitter events where they announce their “Top 10”, then “Top 5” and then final college choices. For those top 2% of recruits and their families, that’s got to be an awesome experience. And, with the social media available to them, why not? It it helps you make $250,000 on a scholarship, who cares?
Yet, for the 98% of the rest of recruits, this just isn’t reality. Nick Saban probably is not going to be FaceTiming you. The Army All American Bowl is not going to extend you an invite. That DI dream school is not going to be knocking on your door.
When you zoom out to 30,000ft, today’s college football is more of an industrial complex than a sport - multi-billion dollar TV deals, dedicated graphics departments, ten man recruiting teams, campus visits, and, not to mention a cottage industry of third party trainers, coaches, speed coaches, QB/OL/K/LB/RB coaches (some good, some bad) and street agents (avoid those guys) who all work in conjunction with the high education system to create a hype machine finely attuned to the insecurities of young athletes and parents.
Let’s start with parents.
Being a parent has never been easy. Parents are locked in a timeless tension between trying to let their young adult children become their own person while at the same time knowing that they don’t know what they don’t know. While their child might look 25 and be age 18, they’re forever going to look five months old to their parents, helpless and ever in need of their care. This isn’t new.
What is new, however, are the contexts in which parents find themselves parenting in. Most parents in 2021 are, what we loosely consider to be millennials. Millennial parents get a bad wrap as helicopter parents, being over protective and spawning the birth of the viral “Karen’s” (who, of course, would like to speak to the manage, please). But, let’s not totally hate on the millennial parents, just yet.
While there is no test to determine who can or cannot be a parent, at least in America, it is every parent’s solemn duty to realize their child’s fullest potential. In the US, potential is priceless. Realizing potential is synonymous with going to to college. Potential is what the American Dream is all about. College is the “god of the American childhood” David Perrel once wrote, and if this is so, high schools are its houses of worship.
Going with the religious metaphor for a second, if schools are the houses of worship for college, then the National Honors Society, AP scores, SAT/ACT tutoring, writing coaches, endless clubs and being a team sports captain in three seasons are probably the closest thing to its blessed sacraments that parents and students vye for. Oh wait! Don’t forget to drive to your club volley ball team practice after your high school team practice and to tell coach you can’t make the game this weekend because you had to attend an “exposure camp”.
When you look at the parents of some of these high-achieving high school students they look just as stressed out and tired as their kids. While it is developmentally appropriate for all young people to go through bouts of depression or anxiety, the rates of depression and teen suicide have hockey-stick spiked with millennials and only continued to go up with Gen Z’ers.
Why? Why are millennial parents willing to go to such great lengths to ensure their child is the most marketable possible for an exclusive, prestigious college athletic team? Why do parents of Gen Z’ers look just as tired as their children?
While the sociology on this is still in its infancy, millennial parents were the first parents to experience scarcity, fear and a genuine fear that their children might not be better off than they were. Don’t forget, it was millennials who saw the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, America’s first school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the World Trade Center collapse on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the economy collapse in 2008 just as they were entering the job market, the sociopolitical extremism of the left and right today, Sandy Hook in 2012 and, to add the cherry on top, covid. Millennials were the first generation to experience real fear, real uncertainty and real disillusionment with the idea that their children would actually be better off than they were.
So, what would any good parent do? Take the bull by the horn and clear a pathway for their child economically, academically, athletically and socially with good, but albeit probably misguided intentions. In trying to ensure their children might have access to a better life economically by hovering around their child they may have inadvertently ensured they have a worse life. Soft skills like negotiating with people who have power over you like a teacher or coach have been neglected when mom or dad does it for you. Organizational skills like learning how to budget your own time isn’t learned when mom has a 12 month schedule set for you. And, in the realm of college crank up the pressure, whether explicitly or implicitly, on their child to get there.
Being parented largely in this millennial context, many players have a get to college at all costs mentality, particularly “D1” at all cost.
Are all parents crazy?
I understand the previous analysis of modern day parenting is filled with inferences and opinions. This was not intended to be a peer researched paper true in the granular details but just generally right in the big picture of things. Parents are not the problem. They are doing what probably any parent in any age would do if they found themselves alive trying to raise happy and safe children in 2021 too. Part of understanding the “Blessed to receive an offer from…,” phenomenon is understanding what the parenting context of young athletes today is like.
Players
People are not secure, but this is also nothing new. While our bodies happen to be in 2021 AD our biology is still stuck in 200,000BC. We’re basically cavemen and women with iPhones. And, while we would love to believe and should strive for a world where status doesn’t matter, to our biology status is equated with survival physically and emotionally. We’re wired to want to be an alpha in a given field. This is true for people of all ages, across all generations but it is especially salient in young people.
As a young athlete it is very difficult to separate your self worth from who you are as a player and who you are as a person. And, since American culture worships the fulfillment of potential manifested in the often insanely pressurized college admissions journey, it is very difficult to get denied from your dream school and feel like you didn’t measure up in some way. In the same way, with sports, it is very difficult to be told no by your dream school’s recruiting coordinator and not feel like there is something wrong with you or that you didn’t measure up.
While I’d like for us all to live in a world where well-adjusted people can separate their self worth from their works, I don’t think it is going to happen soon. So, rather than try to fix human biology, we can at least try to learn to dance with it.
It is developmentally appropriate for a young person to seek validation. The irony of being a young person is that most of your day is spent seeking out validation from others for who you are without actually knowing the first thing about who you really are or what you believe.
Real self knowledge usually comes at the expense of time and experience. Something that young people are short on. In the mean time there is a mad scramble for validation.
And, how perfect that Twitter was created to exactly exploit young people’s greatest vulnerabilities to maximize engagement on their app: approval and novelty.
Approval
Despite whatever we say publicly, it is biologically impossible for a human to not care what another human thinks about them. Especially the people who say that they don’t care what someone thinks about them - usually these people care the most (Why else would you get that pointless butterfly tattoo or tribal tattoo or rip your muffler off of your car if you didn’t want people looking at you and didn’t care what they thought? But I digress…) When some “likes” your tweet, they are vicariously “liking you”. That feels nice. When a coach DM’s you with a cool graphic inviting you to come to a camp, that’s cool too, someone thought of you (Or at least your money!) That feels nice too. When a coach “offers” you a spot on their roster, you’ve been validated as a person and football player. There’s nothing more satisfying for a young recruit than that.
Novelty
The mind loves novelty. We can’t resist randomness. Why do you think people get addicted to gambling at the expense of their personal lives and physical health? Every time you tweet out you are pulling the metaphorical Twitter slot machine and, when you go viral you hit the jack pot. I’ll acknowledge the irony that I hit the jackpot with my tweet above which doubled in engagement in the short span of even writing this. And I’ll admit first hand - it feels nice to have people approve of something you did even if it is ephemeral. Just because I am 31 doesn’t mean I am any more or less immune to social media than young people are.
The Need For Status Signaling
In college football, a coach’s and a player’s greatest tool at their disposal is FOMO. The only way to generate FOMO is to signal your status relentlessly. Retweet every camp invite, post every workout you do that week, and take a photo of yourself with coach at the college stadium in the hopes that it’ll get retweeted by that coach’s account with its massive following chalk full of rival schools in their conference always eager to know who is being recruited by who.
If you don’t toot your own horn who will? I totally get this aspect of modern college recruiting. With social media recruits are now basically their own PR companies networked up to social apps linked to 4,000,000,000 billion other active users. All things being equal, usually the athlete who is better at self-marketing is going to have more opportunities to play at the next level than the player who might not be.
America Loves Winners, But Hates Confident People
If Tom Brady stood up after another Super Bowl victory or Lebron James stood at the podium after another NBA finals victory and each said “I’m the best player out there, I’m awesome, everyone else is trash,” they would be torn apart in the media for being arrogant, cocky jerks. But, you don’t hear that. You hear the same refrains: it’s all about the team, we all worked hard, we all did our job and so on.
And, there is nothing wrong with these refrains and being a great teammate and team leader. But, it is ironic that as a country we are enamored with near Christ-like business and sports leaders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Tom Brady, or Lebron James, the notion of hard work always leading to success and rugged individualism able to overcome the odds no matter what. Yet, the moment one of these figures speaks out to acknowledge how great they are, they are vilified as doing things for the wrong reasons, being selfish or egotistical by other Twitter blue check marks (who are ironically doing exactly what they are criticizing).
So, the core predicament facing recruits is interesting:
How do you tell the world how awesome you are without telling the world how awesome you are? How do you signal your status as an elite recruit without being thought of as a jerk?
Enter the phrase, “Blessed to receive an offer from…,”
Deflecting praise in favor of a higher power is an America pastime. Actors at the Oscars, musicians at the Grammy’s, and sports stars on the winner’s podium deflect praise and accolades towards God, their teammates, their parents, and coaches. You hear this too even from young students in Middle School or High School giving acceptance speeches. It’s just a bad look to say how awesome you are. Humility in victory is a highly valued trait.
Enter the “humble brag”
But, what is probably an even worse look is faux humility. When you tweet out “Blessed to receive an offer from…,” while actually having no intention of giving actual thanks to God. Enter the “humble brag”. I’m sure there will be a few Gen Z’ers or folks who are reading will be tortured at how much I butcher this phrase, but as I understand it, a “humble brag” is when one, understanding they can’t status signal explicitly, do it implicitly. A great way to do this, is to just say God did everything for you, while still getting the core message out across to other coaches that “I’m awesome and people want me on their team” while maintain plausible deniability that you were coming across as overconfident.
Who is to judge?
How can you tell from a tweet what is in the core heart of a person tweeting out “Blessed to receive an offer from…,”? You can’t. Only God can tell the condition of one’s heart. Should you hate on a young person for tweeting that out? I don’t think so. The core function of Twitter is to get people to look at you. However, once people are looking your way, what will they see? Once a coach meets the person past the profile, what are they going to say about your demeanor?
I’m am ambivalent still about my initial question of “Why do recruits tweet out Blessed To Receive An Offer From…?” I don’t think actually having an answer is important. That’s not what the intent of my initial tweet was. It was simply to get people to ask questions, and worry less about correct answers.
In Ukraine when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer I had a great language teacher who once told me a Ukrainian saying:
“Language is the only solution that continues the problem, but at least you will understand the problem a bit better each time.”
So, in closing, in imperfect grammar, subpar researched summaries of my collected opinions and experiences over the past ten years, am glad to help continue the problem of college football recruiting. - Brendan 👍