Andy Cook Tell 'Em

There’s one thing that will be missing from Sunday NFL games this fall: Twitter. The league brought down the hammer on the microblogging site Tuesday, instituting new, strict rules that will limit when players, coaches, team personnel, and media can tweet.

According to CNET News, the folks mentioned above must stop tweeting 90 minutes prior to a game and cannot resume until post-game interviews are complete. These limitations are supposed to protect “policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress,” according to a statement from NFL officials. Not only targeting Twitter, the rules apply to other social networking sites like Facebook, too.

While it’s no surprise that the NFL has put the clamp down on its players, coaches and team personnel, it’s a shame that the media won’t be allowed to tweet from games. With the news that a man had received credentials to tweet from press row at St. John’s University men’s basketball games, there was hope Twitter might gain some legitimacy among traditional sports journalists. Oh well, like the old sports axiom says, “There’s always next year.”