Hey Tennessee, hands off Syracuse’s emoji

For those that have the pleasure of avoiding the “recruiting game” on Twitter, you get to avoid the following situation, which happens pretty regularly on the site.

Top-rated recruit either narrows his list or makes a school selection, complete with corresponding emojis per school. While these were once just a random decision by the players themselves, it’s become a pretty coordinated effort by the football staffs themselves. You can’t completely avoid overlap, but there’s largely enough colors, hashtags and emojis to go around.

Except, for some reason, when it comes to the Syracuse Orange and Tennessee Volunteers.

It’s not even the same shade of orange, UT. Lay off.

Of course, it’s been established that Syracuse has lost the battle for the orange #BRAND among major college football programs. But that said, one way to gain it back would be to establish a bit more dominion over the color on social media (at least among recruits).

Our own Kevin Wall took the complaint to Twitter on Tuesday, wondering aloud why Tennessee didn’t use one of its many other options.

Among the top possibilities:

Or even some combination of these and a dog? The letter T could also work far better than the fruit orange -- WHICH IS ACTUALLY SYRACUSE’S MASCOT.

It’s unlikely Tennessee gives up on this anytime soon -- unless we start getting more high-profile recruits to SU (and as a result, more high profile uses of the orange emoji coinciding with Syracuse). But nonetheless, since it’s the offseason, might as well shout about it to no one in particular.

And just for posterity’s sake (44 oranges; so #BRAND).