Florida quarterback Feleipe Franks is now a college football player at a powerhouse program, but he’s a 19-year-old kid, too.

Needless to say, Franks is yet to live up his potential as a 4-star recruit. He’s a 60.7-percent passer with a touchdown-to-interception ratio of 5-to-4 and has been benched for both Luke Del Rio and Malik Zaire, a pair of marginally talented transfers.

Could Franks still develop into a difference maker at the game’s most important position for the Gators? Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, he’s only a redshirt freshman, doesn’t have a plethora of help around him and the coach who signed him, Jim McElwain, has already been axed. On the other, he hasn’t put much on tape to suggest that his future will be any brighter.

As if his confidence couldn’t be any lower, Franks made the innocent mistake of checking his social-media mentions after a 45-16 defeat at Missouri in Week 10.

This isn’t breaking news for a young athlete, plus a higher profile only subjects him to an increased level of scrutiny, but some of the comments made to Franks were nothing short of abhorrent. I wouldn’t dare repeat many of them here.

Some hoped that Franks would get injured. Some contained a standard of profanity usually reserved for Martin Scorsese movies. Some begged for him to quit. Some made zero effort to hide their racism and xenophobia. Some wished he’d never take another snap for their precious orange and blue. Seemingly none offered even a hint of compassion.

Was it indicative of the Florida fan base? No, not necessarily. To be fair, every team in America has a lunatic fringe.

I've asked this question countless times and am yet to get a good answer: What's the upside for an amateur athlete being on social media?

What can we do to stop it? Not much, unfortunately. We can endeavor to be more supportive of our alma maters, in good times and bad. We can do what we can to dismiss the knee-jerk reactions that inhabit the lowest common denominator like a plague.

But there’s a better solution, although it puts the onus on the players themselves and not the fanatics who follow them: Delete all social-media accounts. Get off Facebook. Get off Twitter. Get off Instagram. Get off whatever app was developed in Silicon Valley and downloaded by millennials in the time it took to read this sentence.

I’ve asked this question countless times and am yet to get a good answer: What’s the upside for an amateur athlete being on social media?

“I really don’t know,” Florida interim coach Randy Shannon (below) said Wednesday on the SEC’s weekly coaches teleconference. “Everybody’s different. I mean, a lot of coaches in my profession use social media all the time. I just choose not to do it, so it’s just up to that particular person if he wants to use it or not.”

Credit: Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

I’m 42 years old, so I wasn’t introduced to Facebook until I was around 30. Since I’m a member of the college football media, naturally I have a Twitter account. However, if I weren’t in this line of work, I’d ditch it in a heartbeat.

Franks, like almost every one of his teammates, grew up in the social-media age — even in a remote place like Crawfordville, Fla., where he calls home — and has probably had more conversations with his friends digitally than face-to-face. Kids these days like to keep score amongst themselves with intangible measures like followers and shares.

"As coaches, we sign up for this, obviously, know what we're getting into. But those kids, and they know that they're college football players. But to me, it's remarkable some of the things that people are allowed to say or do." -- Bret Bielema

But Franks is no longer just another teenager. He’s a target. Being on social media is the equivalent of him putting a 280-character bullseye on his own back.

“I think the best thing sometimes for some of these young people to understand is that social media is something that’s, for us, it’s more of an opportunity to express yourself,” Vanderbilt coach Derek Mason said. “But I think sometimes it can become very venomous. What you have to do sometimes is just step away. Step away from your phone. Step away from maybe the emails. Step away from the chat centers. Really, there’s so much more to do day-to-day that has nothing to do with what people are saying on the outside. It’s really about what you do on the inside.”

Circumventing media and having a direct connection with your fan base sounds great, at least in theory. No more answering dumb questions. No more getting misquoted. No more words being taken out of context to fit a predetermined narrative.

However, as a society, we just can’t have nice things. When the internet became part of our daily lives, overnight it was 98-percent pornography. Similarly, with followers having the ability to creep inside an athlete’s various screens, 98 percent of the interaction is hostile in nature. I deal with it myself to some degree, albeit on a much smaller and surely less threatening scale.

Again, I’m 42. It’s not overly important to me. I can laugh off most of it. But remember, Franks is 19. It’s probably very important to him. Clearly, he’s not laughing.

“As coaches, we sign up for this, obviously, know what we’re getting into,” Arkansas coach Bret Bielema said. “But those kids, and they know that they’re college football players. But to me, it’s remarkable some of the things that people are allowed to say or do.”

Also, there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost when players express themselves on social media. Am I trampling on free speech? As a journalist, of course not. Still, these accounts are ticking time bombs.

A kid writes something incendiary on Facebook, gets dismissed. Another tries to slide into a pornstar’s DMs on Twitter, gets busted. Yet another shoots video of himself taking hits from a gas-mask bong, costs himself millions in the NFL Draft once it circulates on Instagram. They’re getting hung with the very rope they’re supplying.

Delete your social media, Feleipe. You’ll find out very quickly that you’re right: They don’t have the guts to say it to your face.