Clay Travis has a new book hitting the shelves August 2009. Click here to check out his new book On Rocky Top.
Bag of Mail

Banning Athletes From Facebook?


Wednesday, July 1, 2009

I'm not 100% sure it's necessary, but I know we're headed full-speed ahead into an awful lot of major controversies as is. Here's the column.

Virtually every college athlete in the country is on Facebook now. This makes sense, it's hard not to be on Facebook if you're under 35, impossible if you're under 25. But Facebook has become a public relations minefield for major athletic programs across the country. Whether it's players being kicked out of school for making a threat in their status message (Wake Forest), posting racist comments about the newly elected President (Texas), setting off an internet firestorm over whether or not you actually posted messages on another person's wall (Georgia) or just having your idiotic responses to quizzes posted all over for others to enjoy (Michigan). This is just the tip of the Facebook iceberg, every program is in danger at every moment of every day. All of this attention and all of this danger raises an intriguing question: Is it time for athletic departments to ban their athletes from having social media profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and the like?

This week the University of Arizona took action to combat the dangers of Facebook, announcing that all of their athletes in every sport must set their profiles to private. Setting the profile to private means that only those people you select as friends can see your profile. Otherwise the profile remains visible to the entire network (generally your college). How serious is Arizona about the new policy? Athletes who don't comply risk losing their scholarships if their online conduct fails to "reflect the high standards of honor and dignity" expected by the school.

But Arizona's policy reflects a tenuous middle ground, once a student accepts a friend request from anyone, their profile becomes accessible. Putting this into context, while researching my new book, one University of Tennessee official confessed to creating fake profiles and then friending the athletes to keep tabs on them. How did he get the athletes to add him as a friend? He took the best looking girl he could find on the internet and built a fake profile around her. When the attractive girl's profile picture showed up in their friend requests, bang, they all accepted.

Fish meet bait.

Labels:

Posted by Clay Travis at 4:39 PM 1 comments


 
Previous Posts

Archives


 
Travis has become enamored of several objects, phrases or events which he frequenly references in the column. Among the most frequent:
 
'Bama Bangs - a term coined by Travis to refer to southern men's hairstyles that feature prominent bangs for no apparent reason. Brodie Croyle and John Parker Wilson are oft-cited violators of 'Bama Bangs rules.
Read More...
 
On Rocky Top When Clay Travis, acclaimed author of Dixieland Delight, decided to spend the 2008 season up close and personal with UT football, he—and every other college football aficionado—thought he was in for a rollicking ride with one of the leading contenders for the national title. After all, when the Vols kicked off the season on September 1, the defending SEC East champions were ranked 18th in the country. As head coach Phillip Fulmer prepared for the game, he reflected upon a coaching career that included an astounding 147 victories, two SEC championships, and a national title. With 34 years at UT under his belt as both a player and coach, the Tennessee native had just signed a contract extension that projected to keep him at the university long enough to become the winningest coach in program history.
Read More...
 
Dixieland Delight There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory.
Read More...
 
Man Book The newly favored man is not really a man at all, but a hairless, effeminate, germ-fearing, non-meat-eating, exfoliating, wristband-wearing woman of the worst order. We as men are told that we must embrace the sacred feminine in ourselves, even if it doesn't actually exist, and become the very quintessence of woman, plus penises. This situation is untenable. This trend must stop.
Read More...
 
Vanderbuilt Law Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson's Creek and My Super Sweet 16. While being raised in Nashville, Tenn., Travis developed a healthy obsession with college sports and Alyssa Milano. As a teenager his greatest accomplishment was taking a doo-rag wearing Luke Duke (balling as Tom Wopat) to the hole at the Nashville YMCA. In the midst of a stellar legal career during which he specialized in rewarding the unjust and punishing the oppressed, Travis began writing for CBS Sports's SPiN section in September 2005...
Read More...
 
 
© Copyright Clay Travis 2009, All Rights Reserved.