All That and a Bag of Mail: Vanderbilt Learns of Facebook Risks

Filed under: Maryland, Vanderbilt, All That and a Bag of Mail

The Internet is not a nice place. It really isn't. You should see the e-mails and tweets anyone who writes on the Internet regularly receives.

Currently, I'm on my 11th consecutive week of receiving death threats. So it came as a bit of a surprise when one of my alma maters decided to announce its football coach on Facebook. Even though, you know, news had already started to leak out about who the coach was, Vanderbilt gamely persevered.

And the Facebook wall? Well, the Facebook wall wasn't pretty. The coaching hire was denigrated, rival fan bases hurled insults and the college football blog everydayshouldbesaturday.com hijacked the wall to announce the impending arrival of Internet coaching meme Ron Prince. (By the way, that's 100 percent not true, I don't want ESPN to cite a source about Ron Prince based on the previous sentence).

In the end, Vandy hired James Franklin, allowing Maryland to force out Ralph Friedgen and make a run at Mike Leach, the coach many Vanderbilt fans wanted the university to hire.

But Vanderbilt's social media trapeze act wasn't the only danger zone of the week for college athletics.

First the Big Ten, in a tone deaf announcement of monumental proportions, proclaimed that its new divisions would be called Leaders and Legends. Insults poured in on Twitter and Facebook, and eventually inundated the office itself. The division names sounded like corporate-speak that stood for nothing -- like those lame inspiration posters that always have a word like "Ascent" and show waves crashing on a beach in office parks -- pick a noun and attach it to a six-team division.

What was astounding about the name selection wasn't the fact that the division names were universally panned, it was that the Big Ten was so surprised by the reaction. Did no one in the league office have the guts to point out, at the least, how negative the reaction was likely to be?

 

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