Texas Twitter

Texas Tech Coach Mike Leach has sailed once again into uncharted territory, this time banning the use of Twitter with some fairly harsh criticism of those who employ the microblogging system. To pick up a quote from ESPN:

"a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time. We'll put mirrors in some of their lockers if that's necessary but they don't have to Twitter."

According to Tech colleagues, the Red Raiders don't have an athletic department policy on Twitter and their academic area has one regarding Facebook. Leach addressed the situation as violations of team rules, well within his prerogative as the head football coach. While we might suggest that a standing policy is better, our own policy is grounded in the same basic idea.

Personally, I think what Leach did was not terribly progressive, but let me be clear -- he's the coach and its his team. He can do what he wants by "banning" his team from participating, but I would remind him of another college athletic name: Laing Kennedy.

Kennedy? Bueller?

Anyone recall the hue and cry, the Ohio ACLU threatened lawsuit, the national sensation set off by Kennedy and Kent State's proclamation that no Golden Flash would be allowed to post on Facebook. Remember it like yesterday because it came days before one of my major presentations at CoSIDA about this new fangled thing called social networking. His June 22 edit was to become effective Aug. 1, 2006, before the start of the fall semester, and ostensibly was for the protection of the student-athletes.

Remember, this was in the wake of the Northwestern soccer team scandal on BadJocks.com, and before some of my own research on why SNW was important for student-athletes assimilation into college and would represent stripping away a key support system through connection to their home communities.

We were in the brave new world of these students daring to say things and show things about their lives to all their friends, and the s looked on in horror. Kennedy backed off his hard-line ban, but that didn't stop some other schools from trying, most with little or no success. Today, education and guidelines are the path for both students and student-athletes in SNW.

Fast-forward to last week's Tech loss to Houston, and the unfortunate comments of a couple of Red Raider players. One lamented his senior year was headed south fast; the other opined about what he perceived as a lack of timeliness of his head coach.

Hey kids, when you get your Tech degrees and go out into the real world, don't try to narc on your boss. It's not losing your Tweets; it's called losing your job.

There will always be someone turning this into a First Amendment issue, which in my humble opinion it is not as much as it is the right of free associative groups to determine the standards of behavior within those private organizations. Free speech always has a price.

But is Leach wrong? No. Twitter isn't for everyone. Not every coach in America is looking to have 500,000-plus followers. In communication (and recruiting), it's just a tool. If you want to see a little of his side of the story, jump here and go to the bottom of the page for the video. We would encourage Leach to know that even though he told all his guys to dump the pages, not so hard for everyone to see them (we certainly learned that and did our best to share that tidbit with the community).

Is he right? Let me get out my self-absorbed mirror to bask in the radiance of my own prose . . . . .

Seriously, I would not recommend banning SNW. They are students. They are young people. They are learning. They will make mistakes. It's our jobs to educate and guide them.

What I do find interesting is Mack Brown's comments in the ESPN first-day coverage of Leach's decision:

Texas coach Mack Brown said he thought it would be against the law to tell players they can't use social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

Granted, that's a paraphrasing by the ESPN author, but Brown's not without issue here. It was barely a year ago at UT that Buck Burnett got the heave-ho from the Longhorns for violation of team rules. Most media ascribed his violations of team rules to the back-up center's unique perspective on the Presidential race, posted on his Facebook account. He's since transferred to Abilene Christian.

Another side story: this account noted that one of the Tech players was promoting his new album set to come out in October, something we here at Arkansas and those at Kansas also learned is a NCAA no-no.