Here’s our expert-analysis hot take on college football recruiting: It’s weird. It’s a process of courtship involving grown adults and teenage boys, where young men are fêted by coaches and fellow students who want them to promise their futures to the school. These teenagers then make semi-binding agreements on a national stage, where other adults celebrate the fact that the football team they care about should have some good years ahead of it because experts gave a high star-rating to the kid in question. The boys are expected to honor those commitments they make as teenagers (even though they are made to coaches who could hop to the NFL or a higher-profile college program if the right opportunity came up), because as they are developing from boys into men, they are being taught that their word matters.

That’s the nature of the game, and it’s so much a part of college football that we don’t even really think about it much, but if you strip it of that context and think about it for what it really is—a whole lot of grown-ups getting really excited about what some teenage boys are planning to do—”weird” is a fair word.

Even with all of that in mind, though, last night got weird for the Aggies, whose 2017 recruiting class took an unusual turn after Tate Martell—one of the top-ranked dual-threat quarterbacks in that class—announced via Twitter that he’d be decommitting from the school.

https://twitter.com/TheTateMartell/status/728064179031015425

Martell’s an intriguing player, but his choice to enter A&M was unexpected—he made the decision in August after he had previously decommitted from Washington (which—in a reminder that this whole process is really very bizarre—he had committed to before he entered the eighth grade).

Six minutes after Martell tweeted that he was no longer committed to playing football at Texas A&M, the school’s wide receivers coach, Aaron Moorehead, sent a cryptic tweet of his own:

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Moorehead quickly tweeted again to explain that he totally hadn’t just subtweeted a teenager—but that, sure, his “no loyalty” tweet applied there, too:

https://twitter.com/Amo8685/status/728071842032820225

The tweet storm continued:

https://twitter.com/Amo8685/status/728087578717528064

As Moorehead decried the “BS” of people who lack loyalty, the “tough typers” who make him laugh until he cries, and the “too sensitive” society full of “soft” boys, he stood defiant that he was sending these messages into the world in order to represent Texas A&M football. (In other tweets, since deleted, he declared that this “next group of kids” were “selfish” and had “no accountability,” and that his dad would have “whipped [his] *ss.”) Presumably that delighted many of the people who share Moorehead’s opinion of how the world should work—but it also had the opposite effect on recruits who, seeing the way that an Aggies coach was talking tough about Martell and whatever other unnamed person he actually intended to go after in his initial tweet, began to second-guess the idea of spending the next several years of their life being coached by him.

Four-star wide receiving recruit Manny Netherly, who committed to A&M in November, was one of the players who had second thoughts. An hour after Moorehead tweeted #stillnoloyalty, Netherly announced that, after seeing “what kind of person” he’d be playing for, he’d be reopening his own recruiting process—also via Twitter.

Netherly’s tweet was heard around the Aggie world, which quickly responded—students and fans alike—with fury that Netherly and Martell would both reverse course.

To claim that boys who question whether they want to play for a coach who picks fights with teenagers on Twitter would fail to carry themselves with the quiet dignity of Johnny Manziel is not necessarily a great way to spread that Aggie pride, though, and not long after Netherly decommitted, fellow four-star receiver Tyjon Lindsey—who has yet to commit to a program—took to Twitter to declare that A&M was off of his list of potential destinations:

I would like to say thank you to TAMU & fans but due to some tweets subtweeted towards my brother, I will no longer be looking at A&M.

— Tyjon A. Lindsey ® (@tyjonlindsey) May 5, 2016

Lindsey later deleted his tweet, but the odds are pretty good that he’s nonetheless not going to be wearing maroon when he plays college ball. All of which made for a very strange couple of hours on Twitter for Texas A&M, which saw three high-profile players who could all have been Aggies rule out the program. That’s not all on Moorehead, of course—Martell decommitted before the coach tweeted anything—but it is a heck of a thing to happen on social media in the middle of the night. And regardless of how he felt about Martell’s decision, Moorehead’s tweets chased away two prized wide receivers.

Moorehead, we can assume, spent a sad morning in a publicist’s office based on the way his defiant attitude toward all of this faded when he took to Twitter on Thursday:

https://twitter.com/Amo8685/status/728241952035049472

That’s a far cry from the #TexasTough talk Moorehead had last night, but it’s probably a good idea to apologize. Ultimately, we are talking about teenagers here—boys who, though given enormous opportunities (to play for the next several years for no money), are also under a kind of pressure that few kids their age are prepared to face. Knowing that their every move is being watched and criticized by a slew of grown fans of the football program is a lot to take on—and seeing that same sort of criticism made publicly by the coaches they’ll be trusting their future to has to be a hell of a turn-off. Moorehead will probably be more thoughtful about his tweets in the future—but it’s a reminder the stakes in these situations can be surprisingly high.