AUSTIN, Texas — Let's hear it for Mike Leach, the cranky coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders, for kicking tweeting off the football team.
If there are two things that don't go together, they are pigskin and Twitter, the current online craze. Football players shouldn't be tweeting. Football is a manly game, and Twittering even sounds girly. This is why you never hear anyone sing, "Are you ready for some tweeting?"
Trust me. Remember Dick Butkus, the big, mean, hairy, smelly Chicago Bear linebacker? If you'd asked Dick Butkus if he wanted to exchange tweets, he'd have thought you were up to something just plain wrong and eaten your PC.
And what do you think of when you think of tweeting? The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "tweeting" is, "I thought I saw a puddy tat. I did. I taw a puddy tat."
In case you're a low-tech person who isn't up on all this online-ese, tweeting is what you do when you use the online service Twitter, which provides a really great way to keep up with people you'll never meet.
Through Twitter, people sit at their computers and send little messages back and forth to "followers." Your "followers" are Internet junkies who want to see what you are up to. In other words, they're nosey.
The messages have to be short — 140 characters or less. Or about as many characters as you'll find hanging around Leslie on a Saturday night.
Often, the tweets are simple little notes about whatever it is you are doing at the moment, such as, "The cat just yakked — I'm headed for the paper towels."
Football players shouldn't be taking part in this activity. I mean, what kind of tweet is a football player going to send out? "I just rearranged my jock strap"?
Anyway, the Tech coach found out some of his players were tweeting, but not necessarily in a good way. According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, linebacker Marlon Williams criticized Leach on his Twitter page for being late to a team meeting. Dumb, huh? That would be like using a bullhorn to call your boss an idiot.
Then there was star offensive tackle Brandon Carter, a team captain. After Tech got beat by Houston last weekend, Carter tweeted, "This is not how I saw our season."
That wasn't how Leach saw his season, either. So he suspended Twitter from the team (and Carter, too, for something unrelated to the Twitter page). How tweet it is.
I'm glad Leach got rid of Twitter. It has no place in football. The BCS should take points away from teams for tweeting. A team that tweets excessively should be lucky to end up in the PC Bowl.
Leach summed it up when he called Twitterers "a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time."
Then again, maybe he was talking about columnists.
John Kelso writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: jkelso(at)statesman.com.