Is 'The Day The Tweets Died' Coming?

From the standpoint of a University and its athletic program, there's no good reason to let your athletes tweet freely. From your point of view, no good can come from it. The danger for dubious photos, poor choices of words and negative fan interaction is through the roof.

If Smokey The Bear were in charge of monitoring the potential for danger, his little sign would say "HIGH" all the time.

From the fan point of view, it's tremendous. We get to see the human side to our favorite players. We even get to interact with them, share TV show appreciations, read their day-to-day issues. We can personally wish them well in this week's game and they will respond just as personally. It's an entirely new way to be a sports fan. And it especially works for college. By the time these guys are pros, they're so high-profile that all your mesages to them are white noise. But in college, that LB you love on your team might only have 250 followers and only 15 of them write to him. He's bound to see your message. That's cool.

So, keeping the first part in mind, it should come as no shock that schools like Villanova are banning their basketball players from tweeting during the season. I haven't followed those specific players but I'm willing to bet the ban has more to do with the potential for disaster over anything they've actually done. And believe me, if anyone had tweeted pictures of their dong or of themselves inside a jacuzzi with a joint in one hand and gambling slips in the other...we 'd know about it.

And so, I fear for the future. We know Jim Boeheim hasn't heard of The Twitter yet. Mike Hopkins and Rob Murphy have clearly embraced it, or at least they did until they got bored of it. But what happend when Jay Wright and Boeheim get together at the next Big East Coaches Social and Wright asks Boeheim about his Twitter policies. Boeheim will say I have no idea what you're talking about, Wright will tell me about tweets and Twitpics and Deadspin and that will be it.

(Then again, how that didn't happen after the whole Mookie Jones Affair, I'll never know)

Goodbye "ooo yea that's hot."  Goodbye meal updates. Goodbye personal connection to the team.  That would be a shame.

Same goes for the football team. The Cuse Twitterati have gotten quite used to seeing Andrew Lewis, Chandler Jones and a few other Orange on their Twitterfeeds with updates related to their games and otherwise.

Anyway, let's just savor the good times we have. Any moment the rug could be pulled out from under us and we'll return to our dreary pre-SU Athlete Twitter existence. It won't be the same. But we'll move on.

Then again, let's just hope SU keeps its blinders on. Especially Boeheim and Marrone. Not that either of them know what's going on here anyway.