Think Before You Tweet: Athletes learning lessons the hard way

When an NFL team drafts a player in the first round, they are making a multi-million dollar investment into that player. It would make sense that a business would want to know as much as possible about their investment beforehand, and the Minnesota Vikings are no different.

Thanks to some research, the Vikings have already red flagged eight draft prospects for this year's draft because of dumb tweets the athletes have made.

To be 'red flagged' by an NFL team usually means that they will avoid drafting you at nearly all costs. So prospects are already losing out on potential jobs before they even set foot in Indianapolis for the Combine.

“There were guys I found on Twitter this year that I can’t believe they would post and re-Tweet some of the stuff they were saying,” Rick Spielman, general manager for the Vikings, told USA Today recently. “We wrote a report just on their Twitter accounts.

“I won’t say the names. But out of the 60 that we did, there are eight guys that we have concerns about their Twitter feeds that we will address here.”

Spielman mentioned tweets about partying and doing illegal drugs as some of the one that caught his attention. And this is far from the first instance of Twitter getting athletes in trouble.

 The New York Daily Times put together a gallery of such instances, ranging from international soccer star Wayne Rooney challenging someone to a fight to WNBA player Cappie Pondexter commenting on the tsunami in Japan, saying that God "makes no mistakes" and "They did pearl harbor."


Five years ago, when social media was still relatively new, an athlete may have been able to get away with tweeting something like that. But today, the majority of people know (or at least should know) that nothing you say on social media is private. Social media is available for the whole world to see and you need to have your guard up 24/7 to protect your brand and image.

We need to start teaching athletes as early as possible - possibly even freshman year of high school - to think before they tweet and that something they now could hurt them even two-three years in the future.

Given the immense scrutiny athletes on social media sites face on a daily basis, it could be one of the best moves for their careers.