Some of the stranger NCAA rules (not as strange as the one that once governed schools’ ability to provide cream cheese alongside bagels, though) relate to school employees’ use of social media in recruiting. Coaches, for instance, may like and retweet an athlete’s post announcing that they have committed to a school, thus alerting the coach’s followers to the news, but the coach cannot send an original tweet about the player’s commitment. Weird!
There are ways to get around this, though. Many coaches—particularly the guys in charge of big-time football programs—will send tweets alluding to the fact that they’ve received some big news when a top prospect commits. They can’t mention that Player X has just committed to School Y, but it’s a way to engage the fan base and generate excitement around the program.
Some coaches keep it simple. Oregon’s Dan Lanning just uses a duck emoji, and USC’s Lincoln Riley tweets the emoji version of the Trojans’ “V for victory” symbol. Others show a little more creativity, whether they’ve got a catchphrase or they rely on their school’s media department to create a multimedia element. Here are 10 of the best, with an assist from college football editor Molly Geary, who assembled an exhaustive list of every “bat signal” from a Power 5 coach.
