Tilting at Windmills

Lane Kiffin, meet Web 2.0.

Facebook, Twitter, et al … let’s just call it Web 2.0 for short (@apocalippz is gonna roast me for my obvious lack of coolness on the subject). Social media isn’t just for 12-year-olds with sparkly Myspace graphics, nor for pederasts anonymously cruising for 12-year-olds with sparkly Myspace graphics. It’s big business with everybody from major corporations such as Dell hawking their wares to pithy blogs letting their tens of readers know there new drivel on the site, down to local watering holes tweeting the latest happy hour specials.

Savvy users can also have their tweets sent to their Facebook as a status message. Your Facebook account will then display whatever you just tweeted in your status on everybody’s Wall.

So, before we move any further … you go on Twitter to tweet, your tweet is relayed to Facebook which puts the tweet up as your status and everything’s in synch. Everybody got that?

Sweet. Apparently Lane Kiffin gets it, too. What he (or allegedly somebody tweeting as him) does not get, however, is what constitutes an NCAA violation.

We need to tweet this up to 88 mph!

We already talked about Kiffin’s moral stance on signing convicted rapists (our sponsors request that you please read the rest of this post before posting your snarky Chaisson rants ad nauseum). Now Kiffin’s getting the Vols into NCAA trouble before his team ever hits the field.

Even Kelvin Sampson likely knows that you cannot talk about a recruit until he’s actually signed the LOI. In fact, I think that may be one rule that even Sampson didn’t break (my lord, if he ever figures out Twitter, we might need to set up a separate blog).

Kiffin, or Kiffin’s tweeting surrogate posing as the L-Train, last week updated his Facebook status with the following tweet:

I was so excited to hear that J.C. Copeland committed to play for the Vols today!

In Web 2.0 parlance vis-a-vis NCAA rules (they’ll get around to monitoring social media as soon as they figure out that confounded text messaging first), that’s akin to not only handing an athlete an envelope full of 100 dollar bills, but doing it in front of tens of thousands of people and announcing to everyone that that’s what you’re doing.

Go buy yourself somethin' nice, OJ.

Kiffin should probably get some backslaps from the SEC inbreds brass. As the leaders in creative cheating, Kiffin has now given them new avenues to explore and is forging a new, 21st-Century rule-breaking trails. Way to stay on (rocky) top, SEC!

The OU Athletic Department has released a few vague guidelines on what we Sooner fans can and cannot do in regards to contacting or “encouraging” Sooner recruits. The fact they posted the link on their Facebook page isn’t ironic at all.

Of course, we all pretty much know the rules, ambiguous as they may be. We know that we can’t seriously deliver that Escalade. Taking tests for players is apparently against the rules, too, dadgummit. We can’t expect to give no-show car dealership summer gigs to primadonna quarterbacks and get away with it, either. Hell, even buying a recruit’s brother a chicken salad sandwich is apparently out of the question.

The AD’s press release doesn’t exactly clear up what we can and cannot do online, however. In fact, this should be some pretty interesting stuff to follow in the years to come as we struggle to get our arms around Web 2.0 and social media (save your breath, apocalippz … I know “it’s all about the 3.0 now.” Really).

One item I found particularly interesting was what you can or cannot say on your own site when mentioning an actual recruit:

Q. May I create an online group dedicated to convincing or encouraging a prospect that we want them to attend OU if the group members do not directly contact the prospect?

A. The NCAA would consider this as recruiting activity by boosters, so this would not be permissible.

What this says to me is that one cannot setup a pleasecometoOUandtheEscaldeisyours.com clearinghouse site for recruits looking at OU (or especially a site specifically targeting an individual, either), but one could, ahem, run an OU blog that covers the gamut of Sooner sports, but in the myriad of sports coverage, we they let it be known that if, say, Jackson Jeffcoat or Blake Bell were to come play for the Sooners, we’d they would make sure it was a po$itive deci$ion in hi$ life.

Not that we’d do that here. Bell has already committed to OU.

Really.