Twitter has officially been banned from the Iowa basketball team by head coach Fran McCaffery. Here are McCaffery’s comments on Twitter:
“My overall impressions of social media are negative, for the very reason of what we just experienced,” McCaffery told reporters during the Monday Big 10 teleconference. “It’s not something we can dwell on. I think what we have to do, and what I’ve done, is to tell all of our players to shut down their Twitter accounts until the season is over.”
McCaffery’s reasoning for taking Twitter away from his players came after a 79-74 loss versus Nebraska. After the defeat, fans bashed senior forward Zach McCabe who fouled out after scoring zero points, and he sent out a profane tweet. He later deleted the tweet and apologized.
This comes at a time where scrutiny of athletes on Twitter is being prevalent at the NFL Combine. Players are scrutinized for their character concerns at the combine, and Twitter has made news with the Minnesota Vikings general manager, Rick Spielman. The GM sees eight out of 60 prospects as having real concerns from their Twitter accounts.
“I’m sure in the heck going to ask them when they come in for their interviews,” he said. “I’ve got a list of all their Twitters. I’ve read them and we wrote a report just on their Twitter account. …I won’t say the names but out of the 60 that we did there were eight guys that we have concerns about on Twitter that we’ll address.”
This shows just how much people are looking into Twitter accounts and assuming this is your personality. Athletes and anyone going into the job field, needs to take notice of this. Athletes are some of the most non-stop tweeters, and rookies are essentially making this part of their job interview. San Francisco 49ers GM, Trent Baalke summed it up best:
“We’re in that age of social media,” said San Francison 49ers general manager Trent Baalke. “We pay a great deal of attention to it. When we narrow the board down over the next several weeks, we’ll start identifying the players that we want to run social media with and take a look at their accounts and how active they are and what they’re saying and what they’re doing.”
This is the social media age, and everyone is paying attention.
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