Once upon a time Blake Carringer was a three-star offensive lineman recruit from Tennessee with offers from some of the most accomplished programs in the nation. Except Blake Carringer was different than most of the other big time high school recruiting prospects. Why?
Because he didn’t exist.
Yes, another day another story from the weird and wild realm of college football recruiting.
An Instagram account called Elite College Football claimed that a group of students had brought Carringer out of the same fictional world of Lennay Kekua. Carringer did not play football; he did not receive an offer from Nick Saban at Alabama; he was not a real person.
In spite of that small setback, though, he was still somehow ranked by recruiting services Rivals and 24/7 Sports as a three-star prospect.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt1wbzpB5QD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
You can even see here that another account posted a screenshot of Carringer’s page on the 24/7 site with supposed offers from Alabama and Florida. Carringer initially received a three-star rating from Rivals, which is one of the recruiting services that 24/7 uses for its composite ratings.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt09s6BFnz0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
After the catfishing scheme was made known publicly, 24/7 CEO Shannon Terry publicly called out Rivals for declaring the initial ranking and said that the company would change how they would do their composite rankings. The company will only issue composite rankings for recruits that are also included in 24/7’s own rankings.
Recruiting PSA 1 of 2: Yday a national recruiting service rated a prospect that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, that service’s public data contributes to the 247 Composite. While appalling, I am not surprised. (continued …)
— Shannon Terry (@ShannonTerry) February 14, 2019
Continued … Ironically, it was same lil brother service that took shots at 247 on NSD. In order to insure that never occurs again neg impacting the Composite, 247 has a new protocol where prospects are no longer given a Composite rating w/o also having a 247Sports rating.
— Shannon Terry (@ShannonTerry) February 14, 2019
It wasn’t just these national recruiting services that got hoodwinked, though. SB Nation found other instances of Carringer gaining traction on social media, even having his fake Twitter handle listed by a local paper for their area recruits to watch in Tennessee.The Carringer Twitter account must have been convincing, as it actually used a picture of an Arizona State offensive lineman, Corey Stephens.
Who are the top 10 recruits to watch for the class of 2020? @TuckerBryn @CooperMays @Tylerbaron23 @elijahyoung52 @DrewFrancis1015 @carringer2020 @TdotH44 @AjDavis1321 @chancellorbri @edwardstyrece13 https://t.co/dJpc74h6NO
— PrepXtra (@prepxtra) February 7, 2019
To be honest, it’s amazing that this doesn’t happen more often. It seems practically impossible for these national recruiting sites to properly scout, vet, and rank thousands and thousands of prospects from coast to coast. It’s not really a shock that a made-up recruit would slip through the cracks, especially if they looked the part on social media. Some have even gotten further than a recruiting ranking in the past – remember Kevin Hart, who faked a hat ceremony declaring his commitment to Cal even though they had never recruited him?
As short lived as it was, at least Blake Carringer will always be able to have a claim to fame that he was a more highly touted high school recruit than J.J. Watt.
About Matt Yoder