High Schoolers Create Fake Recruit With Alabama Offer, Manti Teo's Recruiting Website To Rank Him A 3-Star Prospect

I’m on the record of being a big supporter of the current recruiting system. It may be a bit weird that grown men are analyzing everything about a group of high school boys, but those fellas are very good at what they do. Predicting the future is hard and the recruiting industry (247Sports, Rivals) are very good at it. No team has won a national championship in the 21st century without a roster that has more blue-chip recruits (4+ stars) than not.

There are flaws to the process, though. With thousands of kids needing to be rated, one can fall through the cracks:

A group of high schoolers created a fake Twitter profile for a guy named Blake Carringer (the perfect name for an OL from Tennessee. If you told me every 3-star lineman from Tennessee is named Blake Carringer, I’d believe you):

As other recruits do, they tweeted out “offers” from schools. This convinced recruiting services like Rivals to create a profile for him and give him a ranking:

That is a 247Sports profile above, but it exists because of Rivals (another recruiting website) rating him. As you can see, 247Sports hasn’t rated them personally:

Rivals, on the other side, had rated him a 3-star recruit and just assumed he had an offer from Alabama and Florida because of what this fake account tweeted:

This random guy said Blake came up to him (even though Blake doesn’t exist) to let him know of a recent offer.

This recruiting Twitter account said he is a top 10 recruit to watch in the class of 2020:

Getting catfished by a bunch of high school dudes is just a tough pill to swallow. That’s something you just can’t come back from. Going to take a while for whoever approved the profile for Blake Carringer.

This isn’t the first time a recruiting catfish has occurred. Let’s not forget this kid from Nevada who committed to Cal even though he never talked to the coaches:

Two years ago we had Unique Brissett trim down his list to 10 schools, even though he wasn’t a real human being:

Ahhhh, the crazy world of recruiting.