Restrict players' tweets?
I saw this suggestion to restrict players' tweets this morning. I won't cite the source so the statement can be evaluated on it's own merits.
"Free speech isn't absolute. Actually, it's anything but 'free'.
There remains this misguided notion that the Constitution somehow guarantees no consequences when our words are disruptive, hurtful or reckless.
Twitter has become a needless headache for college football coaches. It's challenging enough for them to monitor 100-plus players at 11 p.m., but now they also must worry about what incendiary missives players might send into unfiltered cyberspace.
Michigan . . . should ban all football-related tweets from players -- and strongly consider banning all tweets. Many tweets serve no purpose but to inflame or potentially embarrass. And if a player objects on the grounds of personal rights, he should be reminded that the opportunity to represent a quality institution is a privilege -- one that could be revoked."
No, you don't ban twitter you hold the players responsible for anything that is tweeted.
If there are repeated issues you can address on a plarer by player basis. I agree with the poster(s) below that the staff should be monitoring it though.
Also - Drew Sharp is a tool.
if the players followed the rules about social media the coaches set , this wouldn't be an issue. Player's where told to set their twitter accounts to private so they could monitor who is veiwing their accounts.
Seems a bit over the top to me and difficult to enforce. Educate the players and put restrictions in place, but an outright ban might create more problems than it solves.
...and it supports the same notion of free speech. If the coaches and program are doing their job then there is aleady an atmosphere of respect and restraint wrapped around a player's mindset when he tweets. Twitter is a slippery slope for every enterprise, not just NCAA football programs. It's the wild west for parents and employers. Some will manage their communications well and others will be clueless. I believe the Hoke and Bielein programs seem to have the situation under control, a couple missteps (Demens-Roundtree-McCray incident) aside.
Some teams have done this, I think, or at least experimented with it. If football coaches are educators (and they like to portray themselves as such) then this is an opportunity to educate. Banning twitter serves no educational function.
restricting Twitter have been in the NFL, but I have not been following it closely. "I is a engineer" not a lawyer but I think the employer / employee relationship is a slightly different animal.
That said, there would be nothing preventing a college coach suggesting that players who choose to use twitter "may" have a harder time seeing the field. (Not that I agree with banning twitter.)
players from tweeting, STOP READING TWEETS. I love many things about this day and age, including many technological advancements that have made things like this blog possible. But nobody knows who I am on this blog, nobody cares, it id completely detached from my actual place in the world and how actual people view me.
However, Twitter is bad. They are enhanced Myspace "updates" and the entire scene is really a joke. Twitter feeds on itself, people develop an unrealistic sense of importance from other people reacting simply to their thoughts. The fact that people are reading and reacting to their thoughts actually alters their thought process, they spew their altered thought process which is then attached with increasing amounts of importance, further altering their beliefs and so on and so on. People become their Twitter selves, their thoughts replace their actions. They are what they think not what they do. Twitter is taking our society to a place it does not want to go. Read the book Feed, and stop reading twitter.
just myspace updates. Twitter breaks things before the media and is great if you follow the right people.
To say it is useless and like myspace is one of the stupidest things I've ever read on the internet. So congrats to that!
These players are hilarious when they tweet. That would be a shame if restricted. Watching Devin Gardner tweet random things about 90s tv shows gets me through lectures
These are kids, they occasionally make mistakes. Restricting twitter/facebook use isn't a reasonable solution. All you can do is hope they learn from any mistakes made.
You can try and explain to them the dangers/consequences of posting certain stuff but ultimately some will have to learn the hard way that twitter/facebook accounts aren't really private in any way.
that is no issue outside of one of the most convoluted sets of rules in the country. As it is, they won't do anything other than force it from a public conversation to a private conversation where it can't be monitored. This is a ridiculous over-reation.
That the conversation is public and not private is the violation, in the NCAA's eyes.
Funny, we always hear about the small handful of athletes who spew stupidity on Twitter, yet we of course never talk about the majority of athletes who use social media responsibly and even the some who use it for good causes (promote charity and/or their school).
The thought of banning Twitter is asinine and it needs to quit being brought up. Like most aspects of life, promoting abstinence of something is all fine and good, yet nowhere near as effective as educating on the possible consequences if something is not done responsibly.
It's not that hard to keep an eye on Twitter. You appoint a GA or student manager (or coach) to follow the players on Twitter. If anything incendiary is mentioned, it's that person's responsibility to alert the coaching staff. Then the issue can be addressed in the proper way. If the player persists in making inappropriate comments, then you go through the proper disciplinary measures (asking him to stop tweeting, having him run conditioners, etc.).
If you're recruiting the right types of kids, Twitter won't be a problem. They might make some mistakes, but the right kind of kids will fix the mistakes. And there aren't any problems arising on Twitter that can't also happen on Facebook or Myspace or any other social networking site.
I agree- except I would add that not all tweets are equal. Tweeting about hating OSU or trash-talking may warrant a discussion with coach, but is much better than tweeting something that is an NCAA violation (like we are dealing with now). I would (and the staff likely does) have a clear policy in place- they are allowed to tweet except for these things (whatever the staff eems innapropriate) and for each of those things here are the consequences- with NCAA things being a more serious offense because it can potentially hurt the whole team and school more than tweeting something that does little more than potentially embarass the player/staff/school
You cannot ban it, but as others have said, part of any school/company/whatever, you need to educate those that are around you on how to properly use or not use a device/service. People need to learn restraint, take a minute and think before you tweet. Doing a ban would really not help in the long run.
Link? LINK
Banning twitter is dumb.
Drew Sharp is dumb.
is dumb on this. There is no restriction on, say, Shane Morris from recruiting for the university. Sure, he is not enrolled, but that's a technicality as far as I'm concerned. He is in effect a student athlete contacting fellow recruits which I think is fine.
How would you enforce rules based on verbal commitments? How would you even know for sure who had committed verbally to whom and how solid that commitment was? The NCAA doesn't have any legal right to patrol the actions of every high school kid in the country--until he's signed his LOI he hasn't taken any formal steps towards even becoming a student-athlete.
There are rules that govern WHO is eligible to become a student-athlete. By doing what they are doing with this whole twitter situation, they are simply protecting the eligibility of the highschool athlete. While it is true that he is not an NCAA kid, if he hopes to one day be one he has to follow the rules, too.
it is a rule that is hard to enforce uniformly. What is to stop a student athlete from calling a recruit who committed? Is the NCAA going to tap phones and assign someone to monitor twitters? I just don't believe that rule provides an advantage and the enforcement of it is silly. Howeva, the coaches should, and I'm sure do, drill into the players that everything they say, do and write could be front page news at a place like UM, especially with the likes of the Free Press' watchfull eye.
what is freely available. These issues didn't exist in the 80's because the Internet was still a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. The point is that the NCAA can' (shouldn't) ignore stuff that is publicly visible.
as a source of news, it's just not that useful. As a reflection of any number of pseudocelebs' and wannabes' empty inner souls and narcissism, it's a cesspool of stoopid. Too reductive. If I were Hoke or Beilein I'd just urge the kids to do better things with their time.
How is this different than an employee who represents his company? For example, if every one of my followers knew that I worked for company X and I chose to make remarks that are unbecoming of the company, I would be in trouble. LINK? LINK
How is this not the same thing? Aren't the players de facto employees of the university? I'm not saying ban it. The seminar they provide on social media is enough, but have a discipline system to make the seminar have teeth.
Show me the money!!
If they are not banning twitter for the fellow in the dorm room next door, it seems a bit unfair. All else being equal, I'd consider a university that lets me live my life, thank you very much.
in the room next door is probably not known as a figurehead for the university. Do you follow every Michigan student who has a Twitter account or just the ones that are semi-famous? All I am saying is that by being paid (scholarships have a monetary value) to play a sport for the University, they should act as other employees of the university.
Up yours. I'm going to play for Saban.
Not really. You have convinced me. In fact, why stop here. We should lock them up when they aren't performing for our benefit. It worked for the Romans. It is for our own protection, after all.
He skips the Hitler reference in favor of an Ancient Romans reference.
Take THAT, Godwin!!!
Corollary?
I was the proud namesake of the BISB Corollary to Godwin's Law:
"As a the length of an MGoThread increases, the odds of someone mentioning RR approach 1"
This whole mess can probably be traced to RR. Bo never had a problem with players tweeting!
If the fellow in the dorm room next door tweets something that gets the University into any sort of legal difficulty, I suspect he'll be having an encounter with someone in authority at the school who will give him an impromptu lesson in proper use of social media.
It's just a lot more likely to happen to an athlete, since they're subject to a lot of regulations the average student isn't.
Roundtree congratulated a player on his commit.
This is a bullshit regulation to begin with, but to make an analogy comparing this to an imaginary "legal situation" is ludicrous.
That's a legal difficulty for the university. Just a small one, but enough to trigger a conversation with the student.
twitter to a conversation with the student?
I'm in favor of a conversation with the athlete. If they were warned about this, I'm in favor of things with the S&C coach that the NCAA might not approve of. I am not in favor of knee-jerk reactions to non-issues.
the actual response to this (and not the reporters' fantasy in the OP) was an educational session on the proper use of social media.
I think the idea of a twitter ban is silly, too, unless the offending tweets became so numerous and uncontrollable that they were risking real penalties from the NCAA, or, worse, the law. And maybe not even then.
I just wanted to point out that the U was treating athletes pretty much like any student would be treated, under the circumstances. That was starting to get lost in the conversation.
Michigan may be a state-run school, but the First Amendment provides absolutely no protection in this situation. It's the same way that a coach doesn't need to exercise due process before punishing students with stadium stairs or some other forms of cruel and unusual punishment.
I was thinking the same thing. Every time I turn around someone is posting "Shane Morris said X" on twitter while talking to other players. In fact, I think Shane is really keeping after Ty Isaac by Twitter. Perhaps our recruiters should warn kids of the potential trouble they could get themselves in? Too bad Yuri Wright didn't have a little better guidance last year.
You can ban calling, and coaches and players will text. Ban texting, they'll go to facebook. Ban that, then Twitter. Humans are social and want to communicate with others, and if one form is stopped, people will just find another way around the rules. It would be much more effective to teach the players about using the tools they have responsibly.
Does the university ban players from going out to dinner because they might be served a drink? Of course not. Smart players will do things the right way, and some less smart players won't. Fact of life.
of this conversation is that going to dinner and having a drink is not a problem unless:
- There is an ESPN film crew following the player
- He/She tweets/facebooks/texts "Man, they're serving me and I'm underage!!"
- He/She does something illegal post-drink that will get publicity
This is all about representing the University. As much as they want to be "carefree, vagabonds living the life of your average college kid," they simply aren't. By choosing to follow the path of a student-athlete, they have chosen to live their lives differently from your normal college student. With privilege comes responsibility. With responsibility comes more responsibility. If I had been talented enough to earn an athletic scholarship, I would have been willing to sacrifice a few LOLs with my buddies to ensure that I got to keep that scholarship.
This can be summed up by the quote from Nebraska's Chancellor in Brian's last post:
There's a standard understanding about regulatory environments that if you regulate something, people will move to the part of their activity that isn't regulated.
Under Lloyd, players weren't allowed to have a Facebook account (at least not with their real name). I don't see how it would be any different for Hoke to restrict Twitter usage.
Want to do it again?