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Catfish Scheme Turns Unknown into 3-Star Recruit

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At one point, Blake Carringer was billed by various college recruiting websites as a 6-foot-6, 315-pound three-star football prospect.

Carringer is actually 5-foot-7, 220 pounds. He’s not on any big schools’ radars, especially not Alabama or Georgia, as a fake Twitter account had claimed. However, he does play football at Grace Christian Academy in Franklin, Tennessee.

The college football world was apparently catfished by someone who created that fake Twitter account and promoted him as one of the top players in the state.

Whoever concocted that scheme had their plan blow up in their face once Grace Christian football coach Rusty Bradley got a phone call last week. It was a coach from Georgia Tech asking about Carringer, who had been billed as a major college prospect.

“He literally is on a recruiting service,” Bradley told the Nashville Tennessean. “I’m trying to figure that out.”

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Bradley also said the high school worked with Twitter in order to have the fake Carringer profile taken down.

Not only did the Georgia Tech coach think Carringer was a legitimate top prospect, but so did recruiting services like Rivals.

Rivals’ policy is to refrain from ranking players who have not been evaluated in person, though someone clearly violated that policy.

Moreover, 247Sports, which uses Rivals to determine its composite rankings of high school recruits, created a profile for Carringer based on the information about him on Rivals’ website. On 247Sports’ site, Carringer was rated a three-star recruit.

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CRAZY story of the day: 247 composite and Rivals rank a FAKE RECRUIT. Blake Carrienger is a 6’6, 315lb Offensive Tackle from Grace Christian HS in Knoxville, Tennessee. Blake holds offers from Georgia, Florida and Alabama among others, and has been rated as a 3 star on 247 and Rivals He also doesn’t exist. Some students made a fake twitter account of this player and without posting ANY film, tweeted out that they had offers from Alabama, etc. and without seeing ANY film or evaluating at all, Rivals put him on the site as a 3 star with a 5.5 rating and gave him a full article on his “evaluation” without even seeing him play. 247s composite found it and posted it on their composite but not their top247 rankings. Rivals has not came out and said anything about this.. Basically, the recruiting sites got catfished ? What y’all think about this? Personally I think it discredits the sites work because it shows that they base star rating off of an offer list only, so in a way some high school kids just exposed a recruiting site ?‍♂️ #CFB #recruiting #Rivals #247

A post shared by Tennessee Recruiting (@rockytoprecruiting) on

Do you think this type of thing happens more than we know?

The fallout from having ranked a player who doesn’t exist (all due respect to the real Carringer) has affected both Rivals and 247Sports.

On Twitter, Rivals admitted the mistake and said it “implemented even stricter policies moving forward” to make sure nothing like this happens again.

247Sports CEO Shannon Terry, meanwhile, called out Rivals for ranking Carringer, which then affected his site’s composite ranking. Terry said that going forward, no player will receive a composite ranking without also having a 247Sports ranking.


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The Tennessean reached out to the actual Blake Carringer and his parents for interviews, but has not had any success.

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Ross Kelly has been a sportswriter since 2009.
Ross Kelly has been a sportswriter since 2009 and previously worked for ESPN, CBS and STATS Inc. A native of Louisiana, Ross now resides in Houston.
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