Kentucky Wildcats Athletics: Letting Twitter Trolls define the Big Blue Nation

For some reason, I was particularly offended by that so I tweeted Forde, just wondering what percentage of the fanbase felt that way.

I will tell you, I am active on Twitter and at no time did I see fans that wanted the Twins to leave.  I admit, I saw some frustration and some of it directed at the Twins themselves, but I never saw any telling them they could not wait till they left.

Which makes me wonder, where did Forde come up with this stat?  “A good percentage” suggests a majority to me or at least in the “above 25%” range.  More than likely Forde saw the same old garbage tweeted by the minority of UK’s fringe element and made the broad generalization that all Kentucky fans are crazy.

I realize that in Forde’s world, he gets the interaction with UK’s fringe element.  But in his words, that is a bed that he made with his repeated trolling of UK fans over the entire John Calipari era.  I am 100% sure that his inbox is filled with hateful comments directed toward he and his family and there are a lot of Kentucky fans in that mix.  But by no means is that  a “good percentage” of UK fans.

And Forde knows that.  Living in Louisville, I’m sure that he knows the nature of most UK fans.  Yet, he has become a UK villain of the old Batman TV series status.  And he counts each and every pageview as I’m sure, so does Yahoo!

But enough about Forde.  This is about the BBN letting this fringe element define them.

I know a ton of Kentucky fans and I would say that most are not on Twitter or most social media.  At least they are not tweeting at national writers and rival fanbases to stir things up.  I admit, I fall victim to being a twitter troll as well, but it’s seriously something I work on.  And I would never tweet something that is going to embarrass the Big Blue Nation.

And most of you reading this are the same way.  John Calipari has 1.27M twitter followers, but that in no way defines the numbers of the BBN.  Mark Stoops has more twitter followers than Will Muschamp and triple Bobby Petrino’s numbers.  But 64.7K is a very small representation of Kentucky’s football fans.  While the social media numbers are impressive, every one knows that this is only a small faction of the entire UK fanbase.  And the ones that use social media to troll fans and writers is a very small faction of that.

Yet, since it was written, it’s a “good percentage” of UK fans that are crazy or bad fans.  It’s a lazy generalization, but it was written and for some people, that is the Gospel about UK fans.  It’s an insult for UK fans, yet that is what is going to happen as long as this fringe element is a vocal element of the fanbase.

Best thing is to just to ignore the national writers that are known as “UK trolls” and don’t give them the pageviews or twitter follows.  Trust me.  hitting the national troll with a couple of thousand unfollows overnight is going to show what the BBN is all about and trust me, if we stop paying attention to the trolls, they will disappear.