The Josh Hader of NFL writers

Lot of teenagers are assholes or act and sound like assholes. Not excusing what this girl tweeted, but as others said, if you start tweeting or posting stuff on social media while in high school you probably should go back and reread it when you start working full time.

 

Or at least run the searches you have to assume busted the people you’re reading about / piling on. Its not a big leap to go from “wow someone caught this guy with old stuff” to “sheeeeet I still have the same account I had in high school/ college.”

If I was a player agent I’d be having my underlings run the searches on all my clients now-ish, really as soon as Hader broke even though I dont think he was first, I’m drawing a blank on other examples for now

 

I think back to when the woman in Charlotte got blown up with this around the Cam Newton thing. The words that got here were not the first I’d think of.

“Nigga” in a song lyric. I might get to that at a point, but it’s probably not in my first 12.

“Racist,” which I’d likely never think to back search for. I’m not sure if that was found by someone intentionally sleuthing or just looking for tweets calling her a racist.

At the time I marveled that tweets with those two words got her just becuase you’ve gotta dig pretty deep in the trove of offensive words to end up there.

 

If I were an agent today, I'd look for anything political on Twitter and get it stricken from the record. When the client is a more established player, free speech carries less peril. But in the NFL in particular, in which a relatively small portion of total contractual amount is truly guaranteed, most players are expendable. NFL teams don't need many reasons to jettison a 28-year-old running back. Twitter gives them another.

 

That's also true for 28-year-old journalists, teachers, lawyers, ditch diggers and aspiring Methodist preachers. Doesn't take an agent to go scrub scrub.

 

There's a site you can go to and upload your entire twitter archive to. When I decided to get into the industry, I deleted 5 years of tweets in about 15 minutes.

 

When everyone's Google search history is made public, we'll all be unemployable.

 

Someone on one of the podcasts I listen to made a good point a while back ...

You know how back in the 1980s and 1990s they started declaring "amnesty" for politicians who smoked pot when they were in college in the 1960s?

We might have to start doing that for social media history.

 

That might be a big ask if the amnesty includes sexting. Passing up a chance for a good, Puritanical freakout over something sex-related would be out of character for this country.

 

I see it as natural selection. If someone is too stupid and/or lazy to scrub bad stuff from their social media past when they arrive in the professional working world, they don't deserve to get/keep a decent job.

 

I was one of three finalists for a job that I didn't get a few years ago, and decided out of curiosity to see if the person who was hired had some of these kinds of tweets from back in the day. The result? Let's just say the employer didn't check, or did and didn't care about the result.

 

My wife is the HR director for a large nonprofit. With every single hire they make, she does a very basic social media search, looking at candidate's public profiles for anything amiss.

She said about 25 percent of the time, she has to DQ a candidate for very sought-after and well-paying jobs because they have been stupid online.

Typically, if they ask, she will tell them why, and the reply includes, "That's my personal page," "That's not legal, you can't do that" and "You're a fucking bitch."

It's the age old story - Give someone a legitimate reason not to hire you, and they will do that.