COLUMBUS, Miss. — Until the knock on his bedroom door, Kylin Hill hadn’t heard the news. He was famous, even more famous than he previously had been.
Standing in the doorway, one of his Mississippi State teammates gestured toward his phone, where on the screen was a tweet Hill published more than an hour ago. The post drew enough attention that its activity indicators—retweets and likes—were spinning like an uncontrollable mileage meter.
“Bruh,” the teammate said, “you’re everywhere.”
Hill wondered why this particular tweet had caused such a firestorm.
All he had done, as one of college football’s elite running backs and the best player in his own state, was directly reply to a tweet from the governor of Mississippi with a threat to sit out the 2020 football season if the 126-year-old state flag, one of the more divisive issues here, was not changed.