When Bengals coach Marvin Lewis says he doesn’t think his players are mature enough to handle Twitter, he doesn’t mean he’s worried that Andy Dalton is going to tweet, “OMG! I love Justin Bieber!” But he is worried that some of his players will tweet information about injuries, playing time or strategy. And as a result he’s telling them to tone down the tweeting.
“I think people have to have the maturity and the wherewithal to be able to handle it,” Lewis said, via CBSSports.com. “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.”
Lewis was apparently upset when rookie cornerback Dre Kirkpatrick tweeted about his knee injury, and after talking it over with older players, Lewis said he decided to tell the team there’s no need to tweet.
“The guys that are the leaders of this football team see no need for it, so they handle it,” Lewis said. “I don’t see the need for it right now because I don’t know if we can distinguish the difference [between team business and personal business]. 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.”
And we now see another reason that Marvin Lewis is glad he’s no longer coaching Chad Ochocinco.