You Better Check Yourselves, Players
Social media has revolutionized athlete-fan interaction — mostly for the better — but the NFL’s policies around it are misguided and self-serving.
By DeAngelo Williams (as told to Jamie O’Grady)
I am not entirely sure when it happened, but we are now living in a very different world than the one in which I grew up. Take a look around you — at your coworkers in the office, at the person whizzing by you at 75 mph on the freeway, even at the members of your family sitting next to you at the dinner table — it feels like everyone is connected, all the time. We check our mentions, update our statuses and upload our images, incessantly and without the slightest worry about the consequences.
I’m as guilty as anyone else, I admit, but the degree to which the modern professional athlete has become obsessed with, dependent upon, and defined by his or her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts is shocking. Not that this necessarily is a bad thing — social media is, after all, a powerful thing. When used wisely, it can alter perceptions; it can change discourses; it can move needles. But social media also comes with its own special brand of peril — its immediacy, permanence, and virtually limitless reach belies an often unseen-before-it’s-too-late downside that can be far greater than any benefit to the athlete.
It should come as no surprise that the incredible rise in visibility and popularity of individual players (over our own teams, even) has directly coincided with the proliferation of social media platforms. In football’s case, the explosion of fantasy play has made things even worse. We athletes are viewed not as human beings, but as commodities — tradeable, expendable, and, if online, open targets for oftentimes despicable slings and arrows from those who view our performance (or lack thereof) between the lines as validation of their fantasy managing prowess.
All too often, fans consider themselves entitled to say whatever they want when “their” player doesn’t meet fantasy expectations. I’ve seen a range of reactions to those situations by athletes, but I think Houston Texans running back Arian Foster said it best:
Foster was then promptly and predictably taken to task; not by some fan, mind you, but by a well-known talking head from ESPN:
What made the exchange so notable wasn’t the fact that Cowherd — a guy who’s made an entire career out of saying silly things — expressed a sentiment that literally millions of people share when it comes to “owning” NFL players on their fantasy squads; it was that he was so naïve to the impact his words have upon his hundreds of thousands of followers. Here’s someone with a national radio show that reaches millions having little to no social media awareness in furthering an ignorant point of view.
The league is partly responsible for this. The NFL has thrown its lot in with its media partners — come hell or high water. The relationship is so important to ownership’s bottom line that players’ ability to communicate freely via social media has become more restricted.
I don’t just mean with respect to the ban on in-game tweeting, either, although to me, that policy makes absolutely zero sense. We all want the game to be as accessible and inclusive as possible, right? Are you seriously going to tell me that a creative in-game tweet from a player who just scored a touchdown wouldn’t go absolutely nuclear? Of course it would, but if we players were allowed to tell the story, there would be less need for postgame press conferences, beat reporters and columnists.
The intent of the NFL’s social media policies (with the tacit approval of the owners) is clear: Keep the cash cow well fed by controlling the message and ensuring that the league doesn’t get (more) egg on its face.
Truth is, the vast majority of the players I know are more than capable of handling their business — either on social media or through opportunities to write at sites like this one — and we should have every right to express ourselves in an uncensored way. For many of us, social media represents a chance to set the record straight, to push back against agenda-based narratives pushed by traditional media. Threatening to fine us — the NFL’s tried, true and preferred “disciplinary method” — does nothing but foster mistrust and resentment between management and labor.
Instead, why not try collaboration, open dialogue and a real willingness to trust players to recognize how much damage social media can cause their personal brands, their teams, and their league when the requisite degree of care and discretion is not applied?
Maybe then, instead of everyone enduring the media’s collective faux-appall at Marshawn Lynch choosing to exercise his right not to speak, he would be able to express himself without fear of financial reprisal. In the NFL, most players talk — heck, we want to talk. Sometimes, we say too much, or we say something inflammatory or offensive, and for this, we are summarily fined. But now we are fined if we don’t talk, too? Marshawn knows he’s damned if he does and he’s damned if he doesn’t — and I don’t blame him for choosing to go with full-on silent treatment; it’s the lesser of two evils, probably.
To be fair, when I first created my various online profiles, I was constantly checking the likes, retweets, shares and follower counts. I wanted to be liked, I wanted my opinions to be validated, I wanted to be accepted. Back then, I didn’t understand that opening a 24/7 conduit to the fans (and the detractors) meant that I was starting an infinite and immutable conversation — and I certainly had no idea that my “popularity” would end up being far less important than my ability to connect with people in a meaningful way.
Don’t get me wrong, not all players use social media as I do. Nowadays, all we need to do is log in, and we can get anything we want delivered right to our doorsteps. And I do mean anything. Athletes needn’t look very hard. The unsolicited opportunities often present themselves.
For me, social media is way for me share who I am as a person off the field; away from the often violent, sometimes grotesque and always intense cauldron which is life in the NFL. Now, giving real-time access to fans — something I certainly never had as a kid looking up to Barry Sanders, Ricky Williams and Jerry Rice — has become a source of great pride for me, and I take the responsibility seriously. It’s not about inflating my ego; it’s about continuing to develop a two-way engagement that enriches my experience and interactions as much as it hopefully does my followers’.
Not that it’s always a rewarding experience. I consistently encounter four types of social media users in my various feeds:
- The Real Fan. These are the people who stick by you no matter what. They’re season ticket holders and jersey buyers and kids. They’re the diehards, and they make social media an amazing tool for athletes. The overwhelming number of my followers fall into this category.
- The Fair-Weather Fan. These are the people who laud you when you score the game-winning TD, and lambast you when you fumble away the team’s chances. I get it, fans have every right to boo you when you play badly, and social media is merely a digital amplification of those voices. Like the million-dollar contracts, it comes with the territory.
- The Red Zone Channel Crew. These are the unfortunate products of the age we live in, the gimme-gimme-gimmer’ers who believe that their bet on the game’s outcome or their decision to start a player in fantasy football somehow makes them a principal to the transaction. They are personally invested in the athlete’s success, and they won’t hesitate to let you know how angry they are when those expectations are not met.
- The Trolls. These are the absolute worst that society has to offer; those who exist only to infect others with their negativity and hate; those whose goal is to draw athletes into saying something stupid; those endlessly grasping at their 0.5 seconds of internet notoriety. As a firm believer in free speech, I try avoid blocking followers unless they say something that is especially despicable or offensive — but these are the social media users who consistently test my resolve.
Ultimately, social media is a way to let people in, but if you’re not careful, there can be serious consequences. Once you tweet it, post it, or upload it, there’s just no putting the horse back in the barn. Players need to think about their futures — about their sons and daughters Googling them 20 years from now. I don’t want to have to try explain something to my daughter someday that simply can’t be explained.
Social media isn’t just about what you broadcast to the world, though. As a portal, the connection runs both ways, and there are predators and opportunists lurking around every corner. I have heard countless stories of professional athletes having to deal with hateful, vulgar, and even racist or threatening comments and replies. And it’s not the players, either — just take a look at the Twitter mentions of guys like Stephen A. Smith or Bomani Jones, and you’ll get a little sense of how much hatred social media can deliver.
I have been lucky enough to avoid most of that, but there was one particular interaction last season that gave me serious pause about social media in general.
It was precipitated by something that happened late in the fourth quarter of our Week 1 matchup against the Seahawks — we were down 12–7, and driving deep into Seattle territory when I took a handoff and got out into space by beating Earl Thomas. Like the pro that he is, though, Thomas didn’t give up on the play and made a tremendous recovery by tomahawking the ball away from me on the 8-yard line. The Seahawks recovered, ran out the clock, and we lost the game.
My teammates and I knew Seattle was a good team — they won it all, didn’t they? — but we also knew that we were legitimate contenders, too. Seattle ended up finishing the regular season 13–3 to clinch the No. 1 overall seed in the NFC; we were 12–4 and ended up losing to a very tough San Francisco team in the playoffs. It’s impossible to know how things would have turned out had I not lost the ball in that critical spot — maybe we score to take the lead, maybe we don’t — but losses are losses, and you can’t get them back.
I felt terrible about it, and I apologized after the game.
Almost immediately, my mentions lit up with positive reaction from Panthers fans, but one misguided person took the opportunity to get personal. He wrote, “Hey, DeAngelo, I hope you don’t fumble that daughter of yours like you fumbled the game away!”
I wish I could tell you that he was alone — that he was just some clueless miscreant — but I can’t. He was not alone, and there are many more like him.
It’s clear that social media is here to stay. You love it. I love it. We all love it. But it also seems clear that everyone needs to take a step back and think critically about the roles they play on the various platforms they are so engaged with. Players who take the plunge need to be just as conscientious as they are readily willing to enjoy the increased exposure and income that comes along with a substantial social media reach.
In the meantime, I will see you on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but don’t be surprised if I don’t respond to you until after we beat Seattle!
