College football is very different from the pros in a number of ways. The compensation for athlete labor is probably up at the top of the list, you were to make one. But for coaches making the transition from recruiting to scheming against the likes of Bill Belichick, well, it can be just as tough for a maturing head ball coach as it is a rookie fresh out of a Power Five school.
Perhaps the most interesting of those transitions as we head into the 2019 NFL season is that of Kliff Kingsbury, the Texas Tech coach who signed on with the Arizona Cardinals this offseason. Kingsbury has already seen a number of big transitions with the Cardinals, the first of which will be the development of Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, the top pick in this year’s draft.
Murray’s arrival also came with the departure of Josh Rosen, who was traded to the Miami Dolphins. But if there were any concerns about whether Kingsbury can handle young players, perhaps those were alleviated by the revelation that the best way to keep an eye on them is to spy on them with dummy social media accounts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxtbRCa0J8g
This news came during a 2016 podcast appearance by Kingsbury and brought to light by AZCentral.com, Kingsbury said that his coaching staff has fake accounts with “cute girls” as the profile pictures, with the hopes that the players let them follow them on social media and show them what they’re doing on Instagram, Twitter and the like.
“We have fake accounts with cute girls that they add right now so we can see what’s going on, who’s tweeting what,” Kingsbury said at the time. “Those are heavily monitored, for sure.”
On the surface this sounds nefarious to say the least, but for Kingsbury as a coach it’s something many other staffs have developed to keep an eye on their young players. And the way it’s framed in this case makes it seem less like players are getting in trouble for the subterfuge as much as it’s to break the ice a bit.
When asked if he thought his players at Texas Tech might have been aware of the spying, Kingsbury told Hawk, “I think they do, but they can’t resist that. Friend requests from cute girls are an automatic follow.”
To be fair, Kingsbury also revealed his secret ring of social media spies were actually deployed for a grander purpose – to liven up an end-of-the-season team meeting in the film room.
“Once a year, we’ll capture the most absurd posts our team makes and we make a big presentation and have a lot of fun with it,” he said, laughing.
Still, it’s one of the many things that are seen as normal in college football that may be, uh, a labor law violation in a world where athletes are paid. These are professionals Kingsbury is dealing with in Arizona, and spy operations are generally frowned upon in the NFL. If they get caught, that is.
