Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis bans his players from Twitter

Social media can be a blessing and a curse. It allows jocks to speak directly to their fans, giving them a level of access previously unheard of. It can also help to create stars out of the most unlikely characters tweet by tweet. Of course with anything, it’s all in the way you utilize it.

Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis probably disagrees with the blessing part of social media. Lewis has instituted a Twitter ban on his players stemming most recently from an incident in which cornerback Dre Krikpatrick tweeted about a knee injury earlier in the week. From Lewis’ assessment, his team isn’t mature enough to handle Twitter at this point and seem to have a hard time distinguishing between “team business” and “personal business.”

“I think people have to have the maturity and the wherewithal to be able to handle it,” Lewis said. “Thus far, what I have experienced since April is we don’t have the maturity to handle it. I don’t see how tweeting is going to help us win a football game. So it’s part of being selfless right now. It’s not best for our football team to be involved in that. It’s best we just take care of ourselves and not announce what we are doing or not doing and commenting on what’s going on in other spots. Let’s just be football players.”

Tweeting hasn’t just been about “what we are or aren’t doing” in quite sometime but if you aren’t into the medium, how do you know the benefits? Lewis claims that this isn’t just his idea. That several veteran players feel the same and are in support of the ban.

“The guys that are the leaders of this football team see no need for it, so they handle it,” It’s not a big deal, just the guys on the team, the older guys, the veterans say why do we need to do it? What is it keeping us from doing? The main thing for us is to win football games, and if it’s getting in our way then we don’t need to do it.”

While I understand the issue of “tweeting team business” can cause problems, banning the medium as a whole seems a bit excessive to me. These are grown men that we are speaking of, not college students. Certain aspects of control with the NFL at times to me explain why their players seem to go ape sh*t during their off season. It’s very regimented. With too much time left to their own devices, seems like SOME – let me express that the KEY word in this is SOME – of the players can’t function well without the structure of the NFL.

I’m sure he’s thrilled to be two seasons removed from Ochocinco.