Only in the world of college recruiting can a tiny heart symbol on a social media feed mean so much.
Hey, college football coach, did you click on that heart underneath that blue-chipper's Twitter post? Better make sure, or else yours won't be the baseball cap he grabs from the table.
Just months ago, a college coach wouldn't be caught dead clicking on anything in a prospect's Twitter feed. If he got caught at all, he'd get called onto the NCAA carpet and punished. Interacting with anything on that kid's feed was among the encyclopedia of secondary violations the NCAA monitored.
But the association wanted to abridge that encyclopedia, so it amended its Twitter rule. Coaches now are allowed to like and retweet recruits' posts.
Some coaches around the state hate the revision. Some just look at it as another burden to bear in the process. No one was jumping for joy at the change.
West Virginia University coaches didn't beat around the bush, not when head coach Dana Holgorsen called the change "nauseating" and recruiting coordinator JaJuan Seider called it "the stupidest thing ever."
They have a point. The NCAA wanted to relieve itself of the hassle of monitoring the Twitter interactions between coaches and recruits, so it pushed the hassle from its plate onto the coaches'. Coaches didn't have to worry about constantly keeping tabs on recruits' Twitter feeds. They didn't have to divine which post from which high school star needed a retweet or a like. They could just point to the NCAA rulebook, shrug their shoulders and say the decision was out of their hands.
Now it's in their hands, and so are their phones, as they scroll through feed after feed making sure their top targets know they're thinking about them.
Just don't tell them you're thinking about them. In fact, don't actually tell them anything. That's an NCAA violation.
Coaches can retweet. Coaches can hit "like." But actually carry on a Twitter conversation, something that might be meaningful between coach and recruit? Oh, no, no, no. That's verboten.
The NCAA: Where "Don't '@' me, bro" goes from Internet meme to official edict.
So the NCAA, in lightening its load, added more weight on to coaches' shoulders in the form of a half-measure that helps a whole lot less than it actually could.
This might seem like a small matter, and coaches have the choice to keep their thumbs off the retweet button. Yet they would do so at their own peril. See, there's no such thing as a small matter in recruiting. At the highest levels, a few retweets and favorites could mean the difference in a five-star prospect picking one school over another.
Marshall coach Doc Holliday, long considered a premier recruiter at stops including West Virginia, North Carolina State and Florida, knows that minute details could become decision-swaying issues on National Signing Day.
"At the end of the day, whatever that rule is, you better be on top of it and you better do it," Holliday said. "If you don't, you get behind. You don't always agree with what's happened, but you better adapt to what the rule is and go 100 miles an hour to make sure nobody's getting an edge on you.
"That's just the way recruiting is," he continued. "You try to find an edge in everything you do. And if Twitter's one of those things, if you don't know how to do it, you better figure it out."
And don't think this is an issue that solely exists in the Football Bowl Subdivision galaxy. Smaller schools deal with it, too, and they have fewer resources with which they can take care of it. University of Charleston football coach Pat Kirkland said Division II coaches need to be just as vigilant on social media without the assistance of an army of staff members relieving coaches' other burdens. At his level, it's the coaches - and all of the coaches - who keep tabs on Twitter.
"It's got to be a staff effort," he said. "It can't just be me or one of the assistants. Everyone has to monitor that stuff. It is tough. It's really tough, but it's just one more thing added onto your plate, I guess."
Then there's the question of how much likes and retweets really should mean to a recruit. Any prospect, from the blue-chippers on down, appreciate it when schools show them some love, even if it's just a coach pressing a heart symbol on a social media account to let a recruit know he's thinking about him.
But if that's really the reason a recruit picks a school? West Virginia State coach Jon Anderson said a football program might want to pause and ponder.
"If a recruit is worried whether you're retweeting or not, and that's the level of high profile that they are, you have to seriously consider whether that's the type of person that will fit in your program or not," Anderson said. "Now, that sounds really strong, but we're looking for guys who are bought into the team and team-first."
Anderson is like many other coaches who believe it's not a retweet that tips the scales. It's the in-home visits and phone calls, where real relationships can grow between coaches and prospects, and the two sides can figure out whether they're the right fit for each other.
"Deep relationships are built over time with more than 140 characters," Anderson said.
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.