Under the Friday night lights, a high school running back makes a lightning-fast rush for a touchdown—the kind of highlight gold that whets the appetite of a big-time college scout. But when the video plays on the recruiter’s screen, something is a bit off: The player crosses two 30-yard lines on his way into the end zone.
Athletes are increasingly using AI tools to compile the highlight reels that are essential for college recruiting across all sports. The quick rise of automated video editors has enabled hopefuls to put together more sophisticated and polished films to submit to college scouts. But some players are going further, using these AI tools to exaggerate their abilities.
The trend has especially affected football. That’s in part because of the sheer volume of athletes—college football teams look at thousands of potential recruits each year, and sign dozens of them, sometimes on film alone.
It’s a contrast to basketball, with its smaller athlete pool. But Dyami Starks, who runs a Minnesota-based basketball-player development firm, says it’s coming for the court, too: “I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s going to happen, though I don’t know to what extent.”
AI has only gotten more sophisticated—yet for most athletic department staffers, the technology is less of a problem and more of a nuisance.
These recruiters and player-development experts have—so far—easily identified tells that footage is fabricated. Just like many AI-generated photos that have oddly deformed hands, it’s usually easy to spot, say, biologically impossible movements that blow an athlete’s cover.
“We’ve seen one or two isolated incidents with it,” says Brad Larrondo, executive senior AD and football GM at Washington State University. He says that coaches have noticed some “little glitches” or strange, robotic movements that tend to tip them off that the video has been manipulated.
Larrondo adds that even if a fake video may fool some scouts, the athlete’s ruse won’t make it too far, as coaches will then look at full game film and other resources. Potential recruits simply won’t have the time or energy to manipulate hours of footage, he says, and when deciding which 100 or 150 athletes to offer scholarships to, collegiate staffs will do their due diligence and eventually uncover the fake highlights.
More than anything, reviewing AI-doctored footage is simply a time-suck.
Starks says it’s especially a drag on smaller programs with lean staffs: Coaches and recruiters of mid- and low-major programs have their work cut out for them. He believes athletes in numerous sports, with some awareness that they probably won’t make teams at larger programs, will think they’ll have a better chance of slipping their AI-bolstered reels under the radar at schools that have less man-power.
It’s also a massive risk for the athletes, who have a lot to lose if they’re found out. “They’ll be blackballed. It’s a small coaching fraternity, and word gets around,” says Dan Cornely, assistant director for the MBA in Sport Management program at Florida Atlantic University. “If a guy projects D-I and he does this? He’ll probably go down an entire division.”
Larrondo agrees: “It discredits the athlete who sent it in. That’s not the type of guy we’re looking to recruit.”
And anyway, young athletes’ attempts to enhance their highlight reels “isn’t anything new,” says Cornley. “It’s been going on for years—you always see somebody manipulating something.”
Cornely is the former director of partnerships and a football scout at recruiting agency Next College Student Athlete, and says that athletes were even trying to doctor film back when their highlights were being shared on VHS tapes. “It’s like if you listen to a podcast at 1.5 speed. They could speed up the end of a tape, making it look like they’re running faster. It was basic stuff, but now, with AI, it’s more advanced.”
Some athletes will always go above and beyond to get noticed, even if that means fudging the truth. AI is just another chapter in the race to the top—one that’s ultimately more exhausting than earth-shattering.
“It’s not going to make a big splash,” Starks says. “You can’t fake putting a ball in a hoop.”
