Black and Blue ReviewThe Panthers, like many teams, have told reporters they can’t tweet while they watch this year’s OTAs. Considering we’re still more than three months away from games that count, and that these workouts don’t involve game planning, it’s a silly restriction.
A few years ago, when social media was emerging as an innovative way to communicate with fans, I would’ve made a big stink. But I was actually thrilled when I heard about the no-tweeting rule.
First of all, as someone who’s constantly guilty of spending too much time staring at a phone, I can admit it’s tough to completely take in all that’s going on in real life. If I’m always tweeting, there’s a lot I’m missing.
Also, as great as social and digital media have been at opening up new information channels, we haven’t yet invented a good filter. As a result, quantity has replaced quality.
Think about how out of control the NFL Draft has gotten.
We spend months listening to experts who have little clue what the teams themselves are actually planning. Nearly every media outlet churns out mock drafts that end up nowhere close to accurate. And when a club that wasn’t interested in say, the lesser tiers of offensive tackles, doesn’t pick one of those tackles, many fans are left frustrated because their team didn’t take a guy they hadn’t even heard of before one of the experts matched that player with the club.
That was sort of a tangent, so back to the original point.
There’s certainly plenty of worthwhile information to be gleaned from OTAs, and the main culprit in this, training camp. You can get a sense of the depth chart and what players are emerging or disappointing. But when the media starts broadcasting the result of nearly every play during what are still just practices, the noise tends to push context out of the way. And in our current world of making black and white decisions after every moment, it’s a disservice to everyone involved.
As it has always been, the media’s job is to gather information and then explain it as knowledgeably as possible to fans. Tweeting play-by-play or an overload of information from practices is essentially just throwing up all that info. Some who have an unlimited thirst for NFL nuggets are cool with cleaning up, but we’d prefer to avoid that mess.
So here’s the deal — BBR will be in Spartanburg for the entirety of Panthers’ training camp. If you want play-by-play tweets, you’ll be able to find them, but we’ll unfortunately let you down in that department.
We already have a few ideas to provide what you need to know, when you want to know it, in a more digestible way. But since we’re still a couple months away from camp, we have time to talk it out.
Next week, we’ll post a survey similar to the one we’ve had up about Panthers’ media. We’ll include a bunch of questions about what you’ve liked or disliked about previous coverage of Carolina’s camps.
In the meantime, we’re all ears for any ideas or requests you have right now. Fans had a couple good thoughts when we brought this up Thursday on Twitter, and if you’re interested in sharing, you can tweet us or leave a comment below.
BBR NUGGETS
- A fantastic piece by DeAngelo Williams about his mom. — MMQB
- Kony Ealy’s contract is done, leaving Kelvin Benjamin and Trai Turner as the remaining unsigned draft picks. — Twitter
- Turner will get paid soon, so … – Twitter
- While walking back to Bank of America Stadium from the practice fields Wednesday, Ron Rivera described what he learned from crews when he was in the pits during the Sprint All-Star Race. He then did this Thursday. — Twitter
- A couple solid posts from Jonathan Stewart. — 1) Instagram 2) Instagram
- Kelvin Benjamin and Cam Newton had good excuses to miss Thursday’s OTAs. — BBR
- An Auburn guy joking with an Alabama commit. The horror! — BamaOnline
- Steve Smith SENIOR talked to Ravens’ media. — baltimoreravens.com
COMING UP
At Friday’s Charlotte Touchdown Club luncheon, Ron Rivera will introduce the featured speaker, his former Bears coach, Mike Ditka. We’ll be there gathering pictures, videos and quotes.