Is Tom Crean "out twittering" Calipari when it comes to Kyrie Irving?
By Staff
Interesting thing this twitter.
Coach Calipari has been the unofficial “NCAA hoops king of twitter” as he has blown past 400,000 followers and entertained his followers with tales of his “mean and nimble” German Shepherd, his son Brad’s basketball games and his discovery of new eating places around Lexington. But for his credit, Calipari has been very mum on one thing and has refused to twitter about one thing: potential recruits.
Now I assume, Calipari could make some random comments about some recruits and kind of sway them to UK. As of now, Twittering is still legal among NCAA coaches and there has been no discussions on limiting the messages or even banning it like the NCAA did with text messaging.
Most coaches use their twitters as a way to self promote themselves or to feed the fans brief tidbits about what goes on in their lives and at the school. It has become a pastime for the BBN to second guess Caliparis’s sometime cryptic texts like a psychic reading tea leaves. To his credit, Calipari has remained silent on any comments about recruits or players that may transfer. While Cal has over 400K followers, he follows only a few. Most of them are his own players, fellow UK coaches and assorted media types.
Tom Crean, the head of IU is the person that turned Calipari onto Twitter. And Crean has his followers but really had followed no one. Until recently. If you look now, yes, that is 2010 recruit Kyrie Irving that Crean is following. You can argue that Crean is making a public statement that Irving is his number one target since Irving is the only recruit he is following on twitter. While there is nothing wrong with that, Crean has gone into the gray area of twittering with his recent “conversations” towards Irving.
On July 6, Irving sent out a twitter text that read simply, “Hungry and humble for more”. Two days later, Crean sent out a text to his Hoosier masses that read ‘we need the recruits to have the courage and the ability 2 make it happen for us”. Then just two minutes later, this gem went out “We need CONSISTENT TOUGHNESS and CONFIDENDT COMPETITORS! We need HUNGRY and HUMBLE WARRIORS!” Ah that Tom Crean is sly as a fox eh? Oh and the misspelling of confident is all his, not mine.
In researching this, I came upon this article that explained how easily twittering can be a nefarious scheme to circumvent the NCAA rules. But I don’t think Crean intended that.
Granted, Crean did NOTHING WRONG with his text, just making it painfully obvious that he is following Irving’s every move. And border line interacting with recruits on Twitter is something that the NCAA has not dealt with with. There are rules about twitter and Crean once again did nothing wrong, but it all adds up to being a darker shade of gray. And it all appears that this may be much ado about nothing. Irving is not even following Crean on Twitter … or Calipari for that matter.
But it’s something to discuss on a slow Friday morning as we await the first 2010 hoops recruit.
And speaking of things to discuss and reading Calipari’s twitter texts like tea leaves, what does the BBN think of Cal’s texts from a couple of days ago? Cal went on a mini rant which started with this message “If you believe things you are reading, you would think we have dozens of commitments already but we’re still evaluating talent”. Then 8 minutes later, “It’s gratifying to know so many young men want 2 be part of what we’re building. We only pursue studnt-athletes who’ll contribute 2 our goals”. Then almost two hours later, Cal continued his spiel: “For anyone 2 say were taking transfers is disingenuous. Our style of play requires a deep and diverse roster”.
Was Cal fed up with the 1.5 Million assistant coaches in Kentucky? Nah, probably not. Much like his text a couple of weeks ago that UK may only have 11 players, I think Cal just throws things out there to see how the BBN responds. Kind of still testing the water with the Blue masses. It will be interesting to see if Calipari takes the Ocho Cinco route and twitters at half time of games. I can’t wait for this….
“How dare Pitino stroll into MY HOUSE and think he can compete. Take another dose of Wall to Patterson, chump. GO BLUE”
Ah we can only hope, right?
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