Football players fooled by Facebook fakers
A great Yahoo story went up this afternoon on the devious techniques used by NFL executives trying to research their draft prospects. To learn as much as possible, some team officials have been creating fake Facebook accounts that feature photos of attractive young women. They then make "friend" requests with potential draft picks, baiting them with the fake photo to gain access to the players' profiles, photographs and whatever else the player has included on his private Facebook page.
The story quotes anonymous team personnel sources admitting to the practice, so we don't know exactly who's doing the Facebook trolling. But for the sake of visualization, can you imagine Ozzie Newsome posing on the Internet as a hot coed? Or Bill Polian taking on the identity of a 20-something in a short skirt?
Sorry for that.
As funny and surprising as the piece might sound, the tale is actually as old as the Internet itself. Tell me you haven't been fooled by some old guy in a chat room, pretending to be something he's not.
In that way, you now have more in common with your favorite football star than you thought.
[After the jump, find out what Raven linebacker Tavares Gooden has to do with all this.]
The motivation behind the deception is NFL teams wanting to take extra caution as it concerns what kind of players they bring in. The article, written by Charles Robinson, even dredges up the "7th Floor Crew," a group of former Miami Hurricanes players who recorded a risque rap song several years ago. The Ravens' Tavares Gooden was a part of that crew. Here's an excerpt from the Yahoo piece:
Even now, there are multiple Facebook groups and Myspace pages devoted to the “7th Floor Crew” and the expletive-laden song, which depicts wildly explicit sexual scenes. It can also be found on Youtube, complete with photos of the players in their NFL uniforms. And it serves as a perfect example of a red flag NFL teams are in search for when they are diving into social networking sites for information.
“I was 17 going on 18 [when we recorded it],” said Gooden, a third-round pick of the Baltimore Ravens last year. “We were all freshmen. It wasn’t anything we were going to put out online. We didn’t do that. Somebody actually stole it off this guy’s computer. We were just all kidding around. We did it in a dorm room. We didn’t even do it in a studio. Somebody stole it off this guy’s computer and he found it funny and was like ‘I’ve got some UM players rapping.’ And he puts it online, which violated our privacy. We probably could have sued this kid, because we didn’t put this stuff out there.
“There’s always going to be some stuff out there – it’s just, do you learn from it? For me, personally, I really don’t care. Right now, I’m where I want to be at and just looking forward. My main thing is just not to worry about the past. If somebody else wants to chuckle and laugh about that, they can go right ahead. I’ll just keep getting better and progressing while other people keep [regressing] looking at those things and trying to find some way to hold us down. All of us were young when we made that song. … That taught me, you’ve got to watch that you say, and who you do it around.”
And now players have to worry about with whom they share things. Pretty young Internet lady whose casual emails keep mentioning "upside," "cap space," and "guaranteed non-tender tender?"
Nope, probably not the best Facebook friends.
