The Year In Deadspin's Coverage Of The Overzealous Policing Of Student-Athletes

It's a great time to be a college athlete. Well, at least it is if being a college athlete is supposed to be a whole lot like being an East German. We learned a great deal in 2012 about the Kollege Kops, and their experiments with emerging technologies. We hope we don't see them nearly as much next year. But, lo, here's a story about Ohio State monitoring its athletes' checking accounts. Things may not be getting better anytime soon.

In March, we learned a little about the cottage industry that has sprung up around monitoring the Twitter and Facebook accounts of college athletes. Six of the schools that appeared in this year's men's Elite Eight have contracts with companies that track what the athletes are doing on social media. More »

For much more about companies that monitor college athletes on social media, read our main story. This is the master spreadsheet for trigger words that UDiligence, a social-media monitoring service, provides to all its client universities. More »

Last month, we met three firms that colleges are using to monitor athletes on Facebook and Twitter. It's ethically and procedurally dubious work, so you might assume the companies would be extra-scrupulous about how they run their own businesses. More »

College football players are men. They're at least 18, so they can vote, they can serve in the armed forces, they can smoke, and they can roam the streets of America until all hours, doing whatever it is college kids do, so long as they don't do anything illegal. More »

Just in case you thought the whole creepy social media monitoring thing was starting to die down, it's not. Back in May, we got a glimpse into LSU's use of a social media monitoring company called UDiligence, where athletes were already being monitored for the use of hundreds of hilarious trigger... More »