Catfish Scheme Turns Unknown into 3-Star Recruit
At one point, Blake Carringer was billed by various college recruiting websites as a 6-foot-6, 315-pound three-star football prospect.
Carringer is actually 5-foot-7, 220 pounds. He’s not on any big schools’ radars, especially not Alabama or Georgia, as a fake Twitter account had claimed. However, he does play football at Grace Christian Academy in Franklin, Tennessee.
The college football world was apparently catfished by someone who created that fake Twitter account and promoted him as one of the top players in the state.
Whoever concocted that scheme had their plan blow up in their face once Grace Christian football coach Rusty Bradley got a phone call last week. It was a coach from Georgia Tech asking about Carringer, who had been billed as a major college prospect.
“He literally is on a recruiting service,” Bradley told the Nashville Tennessean. “I’m trying to figure that out.”
Bradley also said the high school worked with Twitter in order to have the fake Carringer profile taken down.
Not only did the Georgia Tech coach think Carringer was a legitimate top prospect, but so did recruiting services like Rivals.
Rivals’ policy is to refrain from ranking players who have not been evaluated in person, though someone clearly violated that policy.
Moreover, 247Sports, which uses Rivals to determine its composite rankings of high school recruits, created a profile for Carringer based on the information about him on Rivals’ website. On 247Sports’ site, Carringer was rated a three-star recruit.
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The fallout from having ranked a player who doesn’t exist (all due respect to the real Carringer) has affected both Rivals and 247Sports.
On Twitter, Rivals admitted the mistake and said it “implemented even stricter policies moving forward” to make sure nothing like this happens again.
247Sports CEO Shannon Terry, meanwhile, called out Rivals for ranking Carringer, which then affected his site’s composite ranking. Terry said that going forward, no player will receive a composite ranking without also having a 247Sports ranking.
The Tennessean reached out to the actual Blake Carringer and his parents for interviews, but has not had any success.
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