For several hours Monday afternoon, the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in the United States was the backup quarterback at the University of Miami.

Most of the time, that would only happen due to some kind of scandal or accusation of criminal behavior. But Tate Martell, the former reality TV star and Ohio State transfer, wasn’t involved in any of those things. All he did was lose out on the starting job to Jarren Williams.

As you can imagine, most of the comments that vaulted Martell to the No. 1 spot on the Twitter cesspool were mean-spirited jokes at his expense, full of snark and schadenfreude because he has not turned out to be the college football player that many people, including Martell, thought he was going to be.

Maybe you don’t feel bad for Martell, who has undeniably gained a reputation as an online trash-talker and whose fame has significantly outpaced his on-field accomplishments. Maybe you think his comeuppance is warranted after jumping from commitment to commitment as a teenager before finally enrolling at Ohio State, where he was a backup for two seasons before pulling the plug and starting over in Miami.

But it’s moments like this when my overwhelming instinct isn’t to point a finger or shame Martell for buying into the hype machine that has surrounded him for as long as he can remember. Instead, I’d rather look in the mirror to try and better understand how we got to the point where a college kid being less great at sports than he thinks is reason enough for the social media mobs to come after him.

Trust me, Martell isn’t the first or last college football player who thought too highly of himself or has made a social media faux pas that shows some immaturity and entitlement. But the reaction to him, going back to his decision to leave Ohio State and now losing the starting job at Miami, has been particularly and overwhelmingly vicious, which says more about the rest of us than it does him.

MIAMI QB:Tate Martell passed over for Jarren Williams

It’s worth remembering that Martell didn’t do this by himself. He’s just as much a creation of the entire college football culture: The media looking for the next big thing, coaches trying to one-up each other by making meaningless scholarship offers to 14-year-olds, recruiting services glomming onto players who will help them add subscribers without any real certainty about what they’re going to be, adult fans slobbering over unproven high school kids on social media.

Imagine being Martell at 14, getting a scholarship offer from Steve Sarkisian at Washington that helps launch him on a years-long publicity spectacle that included magazine and newspaper features (including one in USA TODAY Sports in 2015), a co-starring role in the Netflix docu-series “QB1: Beyond the Lights” and logging onto social media every day to see well-known people commenting about you and debating where you should play college football.

Do you think you’d have come through the other side of that experience as a perfectly well-adjusted 18-year-old with the proper perspective on how difficult the actual football part is going to be or the understanding of how to be a role player rather than a star or the discipline to avoid saying things on social media that might make you look like an idiot? I don’t think I would. I’m not sure many people would.

Ultimately, though, Martell’s personality issues have largely been harmless. The bottom line to his career is that he just hasn’t been good enough to justify the hype that has been fed into his brain during the formative years of his life.

Hopefully, the final outcome of these experiences is that Martell figures it out and grows up. Sadly, those of you running to social media to drag a college kid because he’s not going to be the starter at Miami are probably never going to get it.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken