Just When You Thought Facebook Was Going Away

Mack Brown dismisses Buck Burnette, the back-up center for the Texas Longhorns, after Burnette makes a really stupid post on his Facebook about Barak Obama's election. I'll leave it for Deadspin to provide the quote and link.

Kudos to Coach Brown for his action. Immediate dismissal from the team. The First Amendment crowd can cry that this is a violation of Mr. Burnette's ability to express himself. That perhaps is was simply satire.

No. Mr. Burnette represented the Longhorns in a public way. He is, for all intents, a public figure. His fate becomes no different than John Rocker. The difference is Mr. Burnette cannot blame the media for misquoting him.

Something I stressed to my student-athlete in the past -- when you run a Facebook/MySpace/SNW page, you have become the media. You have complete responsibility for what appears there. And, accept the liabilities.

It is a shame for Mr. Burnette. He's a college student, and college should be a time for stupidity. I mean that in the best of intentions -- people experiment, people learn who they are, people need the forgiveness that we should have for the learning.

Back in the day, we called them youthful indiscretions.

Today, they become near-felonious offenses.