Thought this was interesting and worth sharing.

Jay Williams is an analyst for ESPN who also does the flagship morning radio show, and recently gave a take on Brian Kelly’s hasty departure from Notre Dame to LSU. As an aside, I can’t believe someone willingly left Notre Dame, but here we are.

So one of the poor souls doing social media for The Worldwide Leader took that quote and truncated it, severely, which led Williams to respond in this fashion:

The tweet, which was deleted, simply said “I think that’s cowardly.” Without the added words, it lacks context and makes the quote sound more caustic and negative. Furthermore, if you go to the source of the material, the entire take is 48 seconds long and I’ll do Williams a solid by transcribing the entire thing here:

“I just feel like it’s cowardly. You know why? Because when you are a head coach, and I get this is a business, but it’s so personal for the young men you recruit. For anyone who has been recruited, when you have a head coach come into your home, that head coach is not only acting as your coach, but almost in a way as a pseudo-father figure to you. They are addressing things that are real about your growth as a young human being and as a young man, and you believe in that. So now you’re telling me there are kids on that team who feel like they still have a shot, if chaos occurs, to still make the college football playoff. And if it does happen, now you’re telling me it can be held against me, because my head coach took the bag somewhere else, and couldn’t even stay on board for another month, in order to see if we have a chance to do this? I think that’s cowardly man. I feel that way, strongly.”

The full quote has so much more meaning to it, yeah?

This is a fundamental problem that pops up on social media now. You have these outlets that do the graphic image, blend a couple of photos together, and then amputate a quote for effect.

This particular one ended up on Twitter as the following finished product:

It’s a pretty rough practice. Media members have been truncating quotes for years now, but the genesis of that was trying to fit newspaper inches and TV time restrictions. We don’t have that on the internet. Sure, you want things to be concise and conversational, because 2,000 words per morning isn’t doable on a regular basis, but we’ve got infinite space to work with in our stories, and even on these social media graphics. They can hold more than four words.