Twitter, the Better Post-Game News Conference

“We’re going to take it week by week,” “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” “we just have to get back to the fundamentals,” and “we have to get better every game” are quotes that have become synonymous with professional athletes in America. The media gets angry when players don’t make themselves available for interviews, but the truth is why bother trying to get that interview when you’re just going to get a vanilla response to a question? In the 21st century the public has been introduced to Twitter and Blogs and many athletes have taken advantage and turned them into ways to promote themselves.

You have Chad Ochocinco and his Twitter account and Chris Cooley of the Washington Redskins with his blog. Both players are great at their respective positions but when their teams start to falter, the media immediately gets on their case that they, as individuals, aren’t spending enough time preparing for each week, because they’re spending too much time “tweeting” or working with their blog. My response to that is so what, the new technology that has been introduced has given fans and the media a better way to get inside the head of professional athletes. While this isn’t necessarily the case with Ochocinco (who shows his personality on the field every Sunday), Twitter and Blogs give the fans the chance to see a personality from these millionaire athletes and gives us a bigger reason to root a certain player or team because fans can actually feel a connection to these players, besides that they just play for their favorite team.

Recently I signed up for a Twitter account and the only people I really follow are members of the Chicago Bears (Jay Cutler, Greg Olsen, Devin Hester, Alex Brown, and Tommie Harris) and then Ochocinco, Shaq, and Mark Sanchez. And after reading the tweets that these guys do you can actually get a sense that these guys prepare real hard all week to put on a great performance each week, but you also get to see a lighter side to them when they are talking trash with each other (see Ochocinco riling up pretty much any Bear with a Twitter), or just tweeting back and forth with different athletes (Cutler and Dwyane Wade). The media can’t have it both ways, they either need to accept the generic responses and look down on Twitter, or just wait for a post game tweet.