LUBBOCK, Texas — ESPN is reporting that Texas Tech football players have been banned from using Twitter:
Coach Mike Leach announced the move Monday after one of his linebackers noted the coach’s tardiness to a Sunday meeting, a day after the Red Raiders lost 29-28 to No. 12 Houston.
According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, linebacker Marlon Williams asked on his Twitter account why he was still in a meeting room when “the head coach can’t even be on time.” That tweet has been deleted.
Offensive lineman Brandon Carter also had a Twitter page. After the loss to the Cougars, he tweeted: “This is not how I saw our season.”
On Sunday, Carter was suspended indefinitely for violating team rules and his Twitter page was nowhere to be found.
Even considering the generalization that football coaches are a humorless, paranoid bunch, this seems extreme.
A company can make whatever social media policy it wants, it can ban it’s employees from using Twitter at work if it wants, it can attempt to limit what those employees say publicly about it, but I can not see how it could ban them from having and using Twitter accounts on their own time.
And I am not suggesting that college football players are employees of the university, but in a way they are. They are subject to the rules and whims of the boss, in this case the head coach, Mike Leach.
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