Jonathon Paige and the Sad Truth of Recruiting News

While I sat here, contemplating whether or not to use the majority of Rock M Nation’s much earlier Morning Links (posted usually around six in the morning, good God) for my first post of the day (being on a one man ship in a boring off-season with shows to watch and Xbox games/ games of mini-golf to play, I refuse to do more than two posts per day unless huge news breaks), I came across two of the only links that seemed to matter in a day of rehashed stories and official statements on the already happening Earnest Ross transfer; (1) Chuck Klosterman’s interesting combination of hard-to-grasp baseball statistics and the importance of a rock ‘n roll member and (2) a story by Eamonn Brennan, ESPN’s well-dressed college basketblogger, on Jonathon Paige, a recruiting blogger that turned out to be playing the world of twitter and recruiting news like a fiddle… a fiddle that was being spoon fed lies.

"He’s a fake, a fraud, the figment of an imagination. In a blog post on Summer Hoop Scoopyesterday, “Paige” — who signs the bottom of the post as “Troll,” an ode to Internet mischief-makers the world over — revealed his site, Twitter account, and everything else about the persona to be an elaborate ruse."

Pardon me for one second…

What “Mr. Paige” had been doing for the past few months, all the while being credited in news stories, discussed on message boards across the internet, and being retweeted by a good number of his (fake) Twitter account followers (around 500, which really isn’t that many, but still enough to cause a stir with enough retweets reporting (this is also fake) that Rodney Purvis is spurning Duke and Missouri to play for the University of Central Florida),* was playing God on the internet to prove something that we all should already know, but don’t follow anyway.

*Whoa, did I really just go parentheses within parentheses? I’m really on the ball today (not true).

"But why? Why make up recruiting news? Why create a false identity? In his own words (seriously this time):When a recruiting “source” brings good news to a fan base, it is instantly credible and plenty are willing to defend the source with recollections of previous information provided that proved correct. When a recruiting source brings bad news, it is open season. “Never heard of this guy”… “probably some opposing fan base’s blogger” …. “I doubt he knows what he is talking about.” In short, fans believe what they want to believe. So, out of boredom and sincere interest in the relationship between the internet, recruiting services, and consumers, I created Jonathon Paige.The ending result was quite brilliant, I can only imagine, and it only proves just how far some people will go with tweets, reports, and “sources” about anything from celebrity deaths* to word that a 5 star recruit is picking so-and-so college. It’s a very simple concept that we should all know better than to go along with (part of the reason you should take all of, for example, Rodney Purvis’s pro-Mizzou tweets with a grain of salt), yet we continue to be baited by. Mizzou is one of the prime examples of this horrible relationship between the instant news media of the internet and false claims from un-named sources.When reports and rumors started flying around that Mike Anderson would be leaving Missouri for Arkansas, a lot of the Tiger faithful were quick to dismiss the reports (which were coming originally from Twitter). Almost everyone in the Missouri camp, from Gabe DeArmond at PowerMizzou.com to Bill C. at Rock M Nation had little reason to believe the tweets. Even yours truly had a hard time with the claims, and it wasn’t like it was out of pure ignorance. The originating tweets were coming from a new reporter out a Tulsa, Oklahoma, a place that would seemingly have no connection to Missouri or Arkansas. When a sane Mizzou fan combined this with Anderson’s family man attitude and the fact that he was going into the senior seasons of his very first big recruiting class didn’t gel with the idea of Anderson leaving behind his players for big bucks and an opportunity to coach at the school he had spent most of his early coaching years with while Nolan Richardson was at the captain’s chair.Of course, perceptions can be a cruel mistress, and Anderson did in fact leave Missouri in a stunning, controversial move that included not addressing the reporters at Columbia, and leaving many of his players in shock, some in tears, after holding a team meeting that all but sealed the fact that he was gone. In the end, our inability to believe that bad news was coming was true; in the beginning it seemed all too ludicrous, and when Anderson was yucking it up down in Fayetteville for a ton of money it all seemed too obvious.To a lesser extent, the same mistake (although on the opposite end of the spectrum) occurred when reports surfaced that Purdue coach Matt Painter was coming to Mizzou. This of course turned out to be yet another embarrassment (and a public one at that) for Mike Alden and company, as Matt Painter, whose alma mater was Purdue, chose to stay at Purdue, which would have been a no-brainer to most sane people. Of course, a lot of tweets from Mizzou reporters that claimed “Painter to Mizzou is 100 percent a done deal” resulted in incredibly happy Mizzou fans believing the news and incredibly pissed Purdue fans dismissing the news as complete B.S. Of course, only one camp could be right, and again Missouri was not that camp. One of the “sources” claiming that Painter was headed to Columbia was a man whose main job was in politics. It was not a good moment for a lot of reporters eager to get the big scoop.So in the end, Jonathon Paige and his fake recruiting news blog, while inventive and original, wasn’t exactly about an issue that needs to be pointed out. We all go through some form of debating the news based on whether the news is positive or negative,  and it’s only one million times quantified when it comes to sports, an area of entertainment that is filled with a lot of passionate fans. I’d argue that the only person or thing with more passionate fans would be the likes of say, Oprah or Justin Bieber.We live in a world where news, real or fake, can reach us minutes after it breaks thanks to high speed internet and the micro-blogging genius of Twitter, which has quickly transitioned from “tell us what you’re doing” to “give the news as it breaks” (and also lots of unfunny comedians who think they’re hilarious, myself included). I’m not calling for a change, because Twitter has been at the forefront of such great stories as the death of Osama Bin Laden. I’m just calling for the constant need to take all news stories that include such buzz words as “rumors” and “sources” and “unofficial” with a grain of salt, preferably a big grain of salt at that. And this is coming from a fan who was conditioned to believe that Mike Anderson was staying, and that Matt Painter was headed to Mizzou, and that Missouri would join the Big Ten and so much more. The lesson that the internet troll of Jonathon Paige was giving us wasn’t anything new, but it is a lesson that we should always take to mind.Published on 06/22/2011 at 1:06 PM CDTLast updated on 10/25/2016 at 12:53 PM CDT When a recruiting “source” brings good news to a fan base, it is instantly credible and plenty are willing to defend the source with recollections of previous information provided that proved correct. When a recruiting source brings bad news, it is open season. “Never heard of this guy”… “probably some opposing fan base’s blogger” …. “I doubt he knows what he is talking about.” In short, fans believe what they want to believe. So, out of boredom and sincere interest in the relationship between the internet, recruiting services, and consumers, I created Jonathon Paige."