It’s mid-afternoon on a Wednesday in October inside the Chick-fil-A on the campus of the University of Alabama Huntsville. I’ve come here to make sense of something I do not understand.
There’s a subculture out there, one fueled by image, ego, information and empty relationships. It is a central vein in the world of college basketball recruiting, but exists without an ounce of oversight. In many ways, it’s a baptism of branding that marks the conversion of a modern athlete to commodity. In 2020, you are not a big-time recruit until your head is superimposed overtop a jersey you’ve never before worn. It’s the definition of an alternate reality and, when it comes to prep hoops, one person stands at the center of this counterfeit universe.
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And here he is, sitting in front of me, crushing a chicken sandwich, trying to explain what the hell this is all about.
Joe Tipton is a 21-year-old junior at Alabama Huntsville. None of the students walking around this student union seem to know or care who he is. Here, Joe Tipton is another guy hunched over the table having lunch.
Online? That’s where Joe Tipton is the omnipresent (and, often times, seemingly, omnipotent) Tipton Edits, a provider and proprietor of aptly named “edits” on Instagram and Twitter. What’s an edit? If you dabble in social media, and you follow college sports, you’ve seen mocked up graphic designs of high school recruits in college uniforms or surrounded by an array of logos. That is an edit. They’re everywhere now, as commonplace in the recruiting process as official visits and final lists of suitors.
In this world — not here, at lunch, but out there, on social media — Tipton is something of a pioneer. He didn’t invent this game, but he helped popularize it and grew his designs into an influential personal brand. This was way back when, he says. “Many, many years ago … oh, I dunno … like … six years ago.” Since then Tipton has watched what was an internet niche break into the mainstream and become an industry in and of itself. College athletic departments have long used graphic designers to lure recruits. Only in recent years, though, have they come to include edits of players donning the school uniform.
Tipton shakes his head. Can’t believe it. There are a lot of things he still can’t quite believe, like why some of the best recruits in the country regularly trust him with information reporters crawl over each other to track down and fans might kill for.
“I still don’t really get how this is a thing,” Tipton says.
Tipton averages more than eight hours of time on his phone per day. (Brendan Quinn / The Athletic)
Information. This is what’s at the center of all this. Tipton is trusted, thus he gets information. As he has gotten bigger, the information has gotten better. The bigger the names, the bigger the audience. The bigger the audience, the bigger his brand. As we speak, Tipton is in touch with a five-star prospect who has told Tipton where he’s going to school but still isn’t scheduled to announce his decision for another two or three weeks. Later on this night, he’ll be hit up to create an edit for another recruit who wants to make his college commitment in real time.
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This is just another day. No different than the last one. No different than tomorrow. As it stands, Tipton has more than 120,000 followers on Instagram and another 12,700 on Twitter. He’s turned his Instagram feed into an information mill large enough that he commissions out some of the design work. He averages well over eight hours of screen time per day on his phone. Even more in the midst of the national lock down. “Like 10 or 12,” he said by phone last week. This is what it takes to exist in this world, for better or worse. He doesn’t know where this is going, but he knows his neck hurts.
The process of watching Joe Tipton create an edit is like watching an eraser illustrate a picture. He unlocks his phone and dives into a folder of design applications. Photoshop. PicsArt. Leonardo. Superimpose X. He pulls a picture from Google Images and chooses an app. In one moment, a player is in one jersey. The next moment, he’s in a different one. Then the image is dressed up with some design elements. Click. Save. Done.
Last week, Duke transfer Alex O’Connell was among the players who reached out. He revealed in a text message he was heading to Creighton next season and asked Tipton for an assist. Tipton asked when he needed it by. “Anytime tomorrow would be straight,” O’Connell replied. “Is that possible?”
“Yes, that’ll work,” Tipton sent back.
Just like that. Voila.
With an assist from Tipton, O’Connell announced his new school on Instagram.
Tipton offers his services for free to high-profile transfers and top-flight recruits. The publicity is the tradeoff. Most of his edits include a TIPTON EDITS logo. A five-star prospect using Tipton’s image drives new followers to his Instagram page. That’s the value. Followers are currency. There are heaps of designers out there, all with unique watermarks, creating images of these players, hoping they get shared and seen.
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Tipton’s direct messages and email constantly overflow with edit requests stretching well beyond names you’ve heard of. Maybe a father wants an edit to prop up his child’s recruitment. Maybe a lower-tier high schooler wants to announce his commitment the same way the top-100 kids do. Maybe a college coach wants to send a recruit an edit of him in uniform. The solicitations come in all variety of ways, at all times of day. (The common thread among them all, of course, is attention and vanity, but more on that later.) Tipton charges $50 a pop and makes a nice little living off the venture. He doesn’t have a part-time job. “It’s school and this,” he says.
Like everything else in recruiting, it’s a business. That’s how Tipton treats it. If a top-ranked recruit sends a text, saying he’s ready to announce his decision, Tipton drops his fork. He gets to work, starts thumbing through his phone. It’s not only the big names that keep him busy. During my visit in October, the mother of a top-150 recruit with 10 high-major offers reached out to Tipton, paying him to create an edit of her son’s list of suitors. It had nothing to do with putting the information out there. It was entirely to drum up more interest.
“Sometimes parents just want their kids to be recruited more,” Tipton says.”I guess they’re somehow that desperate that they’ll go that far. Like, coaches do follow me, but they don’t care — they’re not going to see an edit of a kid that I post and suddenly start recruiting him. At least, I wouldn’t think so. Who knows?”
Along the way, Tipton has turned into some kind of a hybrid graphic designer, internet influencer, promotor, reporter and player confidant. He has no idea how to define what it is he does. He estimates 50 to 100 other individuals are out there creating edits in the mainstream. But few have his name recognition and contact list. Plus, “most of the competition are teenagers.”
Tipton, too, got into the game as a high schooler. He was around 15 when he began creating photoshopped images of NBA stars. He’d post them on social media, then share them with the player. No one particularly cared, though, so Tipton went down a few pegs. He was fascinated by college basketball’s recruiting process and loved high school hoops. He toyed with the idea of creating edited pictures of the top recruits in the country. He sent a picture to Ben Simmons through Instagram when he committed to LSU in November 2014. The next year, Tipton created the tipton.edits Instagram page and began contacting every recruit on the ESPN top-100 list, plus every sophomore on the ESPN top 60. He offered his editing services and began building relationships.
In time, Tipton amassed major recruiting scoops. Before Kevin Knox committed to Kentucky in 2017, most recruiting analysts predicted he’d pick Duke. Nearing his announcement date, Knox messaged Tipton asking for two edits: one for Duke, one for Kentucky. Tipton created both. Then Knox asked him to change something minor on the Kentucky picture, but not the Duke picture. Like that, Tipton knew Knox was picking the Wildcats over the Blue Devils — a stunner. After Knox announced his commitment, Scout.com’s Evan Daniels tweeted, “I’m rarely shocked by a college commitment. I’m very surprised by Kevin Knox’s.” Tipton, who was 19, had it all along. At this point, he was getting used to it. Waves of top-ranked players told Tipton their college choices before anyone else, including the coaches.
Of the players selected in the 2016 NBA Draft, Tipton’s edits were used in the original college announcement for eight of the 60 players chosen.
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In the 2017 draft: 19 of 60.
The 2018 NBA Draft: 22 of 60, including 13 of the top 15.
The 2019 NBA Draft: again, 22 of 60.
Over the last few months, Tipton created graphics used in college announcements for five-star recruits Josh Primo (Alabama), Khristian Lander (Indiana), Jalen Suggs (Gonzaga) and Isaiah Jackson (Kentucky), and four-star prospects Cliff Omoruyi (Rutgers), Zion Harmon (Western Kentucky), Bryce McGowens (Florida State), Jaylen Clark (UCLA), Jalen Terry (Oregon), Javonte Brown-Ferguson (UConn), Moses Moody (Arkansas), Micah Peavy (Texas Tech), Mark Williams (Duke) and Gethro Muscadin (Kansas).
For high-profile players, random edits often land in their direct messages from amateur designers, unsolicited. It’s strange, but all so commonplace now. Rocket Watts, a freshman at Michigan State and a former top-50 recruit, remembers being sent all varieties of designs, including from schools. To him, it was a sign he’d made it.
“When I was young, I looked up to Miles Bridges, Malik Monk, guys like that, so when I saw them posting graphics, I was like, well, when I make my name, I’m gonna be just like them,” says Watts, 19. “I’m gonna have my own say and and come out with my own stuff.”
What Tipton has going for him is name recognition and staying power. When 2020 five-star forward Jaemyn Brakefield committed to Duke last October, he told Tipton the night before because “I trusted him based on how many players he’s done it for in the past.”
Asked why he needed a picture of him in Duke uniform in order to commit, Brakefield said: “It’s all part of the brand now.”
In time, Tipton’s role has grown to include live Instagram interviews with some of the top recruits in the country. His first was with Keion Brooks in January 2019, a five-star prospect from Fort Wayne, Ind. The video was devoured by Kentucky and Indiana fans. It was then that Tipton realized that formal news sites needed to write off that information, which in turn, drove more followers to his page. He now does interviews regularly. The evolution continues.
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“The passion isn’t in the editing,” Tipton says. “That just comes with it. The edits are just my way to be in touch with high school basketball news. So I view myself as a high school news source. People can, you know, check my page if they want to know what’s going on.”
This all seems like a vastly accidental position of power for a 21-year-old who is now getting his hair cut at Distinct Designs, a salon operating out of a converted house across the street from the Locust Grove Baptist Church in New Market, Ala. Tipton was born, raised and lives four miles down the road in Gurley, a town of 800. He went to Madison County High School, where the closest he got to being a five-star player was suiting up for a game against All-American Joshua Langford who attended Madison Academy, the private school 20 miles down US-72.
Tipton is a 21-year-old junior at the University of Alabama Huntsville. (Brendan Quinn / The Athletic)
Tipton’s southern accent is baritone and breathy. He typically sports a well-cropped beard, but recently shaved it off for the first time since he was a sophomore in high school. He always wanted to look older, probably because in his world of online living, who you are is a matter of who you portray yourself to be. Without the beard, Tipton looks younger, though he’ll turn 22 in June. Without the beard, he’s left with large, dark, obedient eyebrows and a pale complexion reddened by the sun of rural North Alabama. That’s where Tipton lives, but Instagram is where he exists.
Mom and Dad have been trying to make sense of this for years. Young Joe would come downstairs and show them an edit on his phone and they’d play along. Oh, that’s nice. Then one day about four years ago, Joe told his mom that he was talking to Shareef O’Neal.
“And I was like, wait, is that like Shaquille O’Neal’s son or something?” Mary Lynn Tipton says. “That was shocking to me. That’s was when I started to get it. Before, I was clueless.”
Lyn Tipton, Joe’s father, works in quality management at a hospital. He came to grasp what his son was doing when Deion Sanders contacted Joe with an edit request for his son and Scottie Pippen posted a picture designed by Joe.
“I came to find that it’s hard to tell him to get off his phone when this is his business,” Lyn says.
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We’re sitting eating dinner at a picnic table on the porch of the Tiptons’ well-kept home atop a long dirt driveway, about a quarter-mile off a sedate two-lane road. It’s quiet here. This isn’t a house that’s cranking the Auburn or Alabama football games in the fall. This is a home where life is kept in proportion. We have spice cake for dessert and Mary Lynn calls it “a taste of fall.”
“I’m not sure where I came from,” Joe tells me later, “or why I got into this.”
In the summer of 2018, Lyn drove his son to an AAU event in Atlanta. It was Joe’s first time seeing his own ecosystem in person. He wore a shirt: TIPTON EDITS, and felt eyes following him. He realized that he was, in some ways, an anonymous celebrity. A few people asked for selfies with him. One of the first players he stopped to talk with was Tre Jones, whom he had exchanged messages with and provided edits for. Jones, who would commit to Duke, referred to Tipton as “sir.”
“But I was only one year older than him,” Tipton says.
Joe watched the games that day and came to learn an important lesson about the world he lives in.
“I was so confused,” Joe says. “The videos make all these guys appear like they’re all superstars. They only post the highlights. Then you watch them play in person and you’re like, wait, he’s the No. 4 point guard? He isn’t that good. He just air-balled that 3.”
Reality in college basketball recruiting, it turns out, is nothing more than what it’s manipulated to be.
Tipton calls it “the industry.” What once was a hobby for him and others who create recruiting graphics is now business. Most high-major Division I athletic departments employ upwards of three or four (sometimes more) full-time graphic designers. Most produce recruiting edits similar to what Tipton does. Coaches pass those images along to recruits as come-hither encouragement or, if a high schooler is ready to commit, as images to post on social media. Tipton is the first to admit that those graphics from the universities are far more professionally produced. “I’m not a graphic artist,” he says. “Frankly, I’m not particularly artistic.” Yet, his edits are still regularly used by some of the biggest names in recruiting and his following remains massive.
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“He’s built a respect level among prospects,” Evan Daniels says. “He comes across as an extremely hard worker. I respect a guy in college who’s grinding away the way he does. It’s a different day and age.”
As he gets older, though, Tipton is becoming more and more self-aware. This is an inevitability when operating in the alleyways of college basketball recruiting. It happens to everyone. Those who fight through the absurdities are able to stick it out.
It boils down to a realization of the primary tenets of recruiting: vapidity and manipulation.
Here, everyone uses everyone. Relationships are inherently transactional and based mostly on feigned flattery. It’s like a Washington, D.C., cocktail party, except the guests are in shorts and Jordans. You might be reading this and thinking that this is all so petty and trivial. One must understand, though, that in this world, words like petty and trivial don’t exist. High-level basketball recruiting is governed by teenage aspiration, adult manipulation and total delusion. Within that, Instagram — inherently an endless feedback loop of self-interest — serves as the ultimate native land. It’s a false reality.
Now, don’t get it twisted — Tipton remains consumed by what he does and loves it. For an outsider trying to understand what is happening in this domain, though, he’s happy to offer some clear-eyed perspective on how this all happens.
“First, it was a thrill, just talking to these top-100 recruits, the best players in the country,” he says. “Then it turned into the followers. Suddenly, there was all this attention. You start getting the likes and the comments. Then it’s the thrill of getting to know where someone is going before anyone else. Then more followers, more likes. It just goes and goes.”
Any writer or reporter who says he or she can’t relate to this is lying. So I nod along.
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“Back then, when I was younger, it was so new to me and so cool,” Joe continues. “It was fascinating that these high school players wanted something from me. So I was like, yes, of course, I’ll do that for you. Now a lot of the players, other people, I know they don’t actually care about me. They only care about what I can give to them. But at the same time, I’ve been able to use all this to my advantage. I’ve built something.
“What’s funny, though, is people associate followers with fame, and that isn’t accurate at all. It’s all image.”
To understand college hoops recruiting in 2020, one must first understand that.
For Tipton, after one more year of college, he’ll go on and decide what’s next. He wants to stay in this space, combining basketball recruiting and social media content. “I find it super-interesting,” he says, but Joe isn’t sure what he’ll do because he’s smart enough to know what that is might not exist yet. After all, six years ago, who had ever heard of an edit?
Joe Tipton helped change that. He’s among those who took the picture and changed the game.
(Top photo of Jalen Green: Courtesy Tipton Edits)
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