This is Internet 101 and Rivals has masterfully failed. This group of high school kids decided to make a fake recruit named Blake (great name) Carringer from Knoxville, Tennessee. Literally all they did was create a fake Twitter account with fake offers from schools like Alabama and Florida. Rivals.com who is supposed to be “top of the line” when it comes to rating high school prospects found the fake Twitter account that had NO FILM on it and put this kid in their system and give him a 3 star rating purely because of his fake offers.
Rivals claims that their information is so good that you should pay a premium subscription to get the full Rivals experience. Well, a good start would be only listing real players and even if the player was real, maybe watch some film before handing out star ratings. Just an idea.
This is literally the fake account. It has since been deleted but it only had 36 followers and all of the tweets were like the one shown. No proof of an offer, or ever visiting a school, or ANY FILM!!! There was no proof this person had ever played a down of football and Rivals entered him in as a three-star recruit. Poor Blake had four stars in his bio, but Rivals only gave him three. What a rip off.
It wasn’t just Rivals that got duped. This is a local Knoxville high school sports site that listed Blake Carringer (@carringer2020) as a top 10 recruit in the Knoxville area.
Here’s an employee of Rivals who even attempted to get in touch with him and either never heard back or whatever he got in his DMs is also fake and he was not able to figure that out himself. Good work, Brian.
Hopefully this whole thing will be a lesson for 1. the people who do these rankings to be more diligent and 2. fans to not take recruiting rankings too seriously because some of the people behind them obviously have no clue what they are talking about.
Rivals has yet to comment on the fake recruit.