Did the title make you curious? Hopefully not from personal experience.
On Tuesday, Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports reported a story that really made me turn my head and question, “Can they do that?” Here’s the opening of Robinson’s article”
The woman in the Facebook picture is attractive, with auburn hair and icy blue eyes. She is flanked by several other women, each armed with an inviting smile and curvy features. Along with the photo is a hopeful note from the female “fan” asking to be added to a player’s personal networking profile.
The twist? These women don’t actually exist, at least not in the way that some unsuspecting NFL prospects are led to believe. Indeed, they are a figment of one NFL team’s imagination – a phony Facebook profile, used as a tool by one franchise in the pre-draft vetting process. A Trojan horse that, when used effectively, unlocks a door to a world of Internet pictures and information which most NFL teams are now consistently compiling to help polish their dossiers on draft picks.
“It works like magic,” said a personnel source that was familiar with his team’s tactic of using counterfeit profiles to link to Facebook and Myspace pages of potential draft picks. The source directed Yahoo! Sports to one of the team’s “ghost profiles” – a term he coined because “once the draft is over, they disappear. It’s like they were never there.”
For those of you who are confused, let me break it down a little bit. The NFL Draft is coming up and NFL teams are about to invest millions of dollars in collegiate athletes. Before players get drafted, athletes are evaluated in every single way. They get asked questions that can range from their favorite type of dance to how dealt with their parents’ divorce when they were 7. Every answer, action, and movement is analyzed, reanalyzed, and overanalyzed.
Now, an NFL team has decided to take things a step further. They are created fake Facebook profiles of women and trying to entice these former college players to accept the bait and accept the friend request. Once they do, the people behind the fake profile go in and analyze every bit of information and picture on the player’s profile.
It’s not a secret that many colleges do something similar. While I am not aware of universities creating “fake” profiles, I do know colleges go in and look at the profiles of potential college students. For some, all it takes is 1 glimpse of underage drinking or illegal activity for them to dismiss a student’s application.
I am even aware that before I was hired at my current job, there is a great possibility that my Facebook and MySpace profiles were analyzed. However, if they were, I’m confident they weren’t done through deceitful measures.
It seems like this unnamed NFL team has taken things a step further. They’re pretending to be someone they are not, and are purposely trying to lure a prospective NFL player into a trap.
I understand teams want to know everything they can about a person before they invest millions of dollars in them, but is this taking things too far?
What are you thoughts about this? Is the NFL taking things too far? Does college and universities take things too far?
