Facebook Follies

I remember when I first encountered facebook. It was the summer before I started at Michigan and I was in a friend's basement when they were setting up their profile. From there, as we all know, the thing skyrocketed.

During my time at the Daily in college, myself and other aspiring journalists would go on Facebook solely for the purpose of trying to find some athlete that had mistakenly put something stupid up (photos, interests, etc). Hell, by the time I was a sophomore and junior in college, facebook had gotten so big that Michigan held a yearly seminar educating its athletes about having a facebook page at all.

It all seemed a little outrageous to me considering a player or person can directly control how much of their personal info they want out there. Well, it doesn't seem so outlandish now that Texas kicked someone off the football team for having inappropriate stuff on his facebook page:

In the status update section of his Facebook page, Buck Burnette posted, “All the hunters gather up, we have a (slur) in the White House,” in reference to Obama’s becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency. Burnette said the comment was a text message he received from a friend and that he exercised bad judgment posting it on his page. He later apologized in a written note that was read by Brown during a team meeting.

What a bummer. It was a pretty vulgar remark he posted, but I'm not sure I would have kicked him off the team for it. If I'm Mack Brown I just bring him into the locker room and tell the rest of the team I'm gonna be gone for 15 minutes. Then you shut the door behind you and let the masses take care of the punishment, if you know what I'm saying. Oh well, it's a good thing Burnette was buried on the Longhorn depth chart, so this doesn't affect their season too much.

Speaking of BCS, the No. 1 team in that poll had a little something of facebook noteworthiness in the same article. I thought I'd share it with you:

Texas Tech senior quarterback Graham Harrell has seen an increase in popularity the last two weeks following wins over Texas and Oklahoma State. Harrell said his Facebook account recently maxed out at 5,000 friends.
“I don’t get on (the site) anymore because it got a little overwhelming. I can’t really keep up with it anymore,” Harrell said. “To add a new friend, I have to delete an old one. That doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it goes.”

Oh that Graham Harrell, he's so dreamy.