You know you were wondering.
Mike Waters has a great piece up today on the perils of social media and college athletes.
What's so great about the article is the way Boeheim comes off compared to his younger counterparts. While Villanova's Jay Wright, St. John's Steve Lavin and Georgetown's John Thompson III seem to live in abject fear of their athletes being on Twitter and Facebook ("I think it’s something that’s very dangerous"), Boeheim (and by extension Syracuse University) practice something seemingly insane:
Trust in their athletes to do the right thing.
"Anything they publish, anything they put out there, if it’s not good, it’s going to come back to haunt them,’’ Boeheim said. "Not only from just their own personal self, but if it’s bad, it’s something I’ll have to react to and I don’t really want to do that. Censorship is not a big thing with me. I think players have to learn what they can do and what they can’t do and what they can say and can’t say. If they put something out there that’s not good, there’s going to be repercussions from it. They have to know that.’’
Teaching personal responsibility to young athletes, what a concept!
Waters breaks down some of the "lowlights" of the Syracuse social media experiment, including Scoop's infamous #collegetaughtme tweet and Mookie's ongoing disdain for keeping things to himself. (And I have to admit I totally missed the whole DaShonte Riley thing when it happened...)
I wondered back in September whether or not Syracuse would follow suit of Villanova and ban Twitter, but it sounds like that's not going to be the case. At least unless Rick Jackson starts tweeting some kind of anti-American manifesto.
Make sure you read the whole thing and add this to the list of reasons to appreciate Jim Boeheim. #oohyeathatshot