Last season, as our own Will Brinson reported, the Bucks’ Charlie Villanueva tweeted the following at halftime:

In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.

This sort of incendiary language cannot be tolerated. This man surreptitiously communicated to the public that his coach wants him to win! Fine this man! Do something!

The NBA formally announced its new social media guidelines Wednesday, informing teams through a league memorandum that the use of cell phones, PDAs and other electronic communications devices — and thus accessing Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sites — is now prohibited during games for players, coaches and other team personnel involved in the game.

Goodness, why?

The league says it is instituting these restrictions “due to the numerous complaints that the NBA and its teams received from fans during last season” and is threatening “fines imposed upon the offending team” for non-compliance.

Wait a minute. Fans were angry because … players were making unauthorized public announcements. This doesn’t fit; it’s like trying to jam a Lego into whatever the singular form of a K’Nex is. I’m calling bullpucky. The Villanueva incident wasn’t completely isolated; it was, however, reflective of a slate of generally inoffensive and inconsequential tweets on behalf of NBA players. Seriously: I challenge you to envision a significant contingent of NBA fans who would bother to contact the league office and register complaints over mid-game tweeting.

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Terrell Owens went catchless Sunday, the first time since 1997. An incredible and outstanding run if you want to boil it down to “actual football” instead of including the “annoying wide receiver” factor. His lack of production brought many a complaint in the media, including NBC analyst Rodney Harrison, who has been known to use steroids stir the pot on occasion.

Sunday’s pot-stirring? Harrison said that TO is “more concerned with his own stats than the team’s success.” Naturally, Owens had no comment on Harrison’s remarks via his widely read Twitter page.

I could less about Rodney Harrison! Anybody tht using steroids, yes STEROIDS rodney, is a cheater & cheated the game!
Is tht Y u used steroids b/c u were worried about ur stats or ws it b/c u were losing it? Lol! U’re a loser & a cheater? Got any steroids I cn borrow?
Hey rodney! Send me sum steroids 2 the Bills facility next week!

The important thing, here, of course, is that no one’s upset. And clearly, it sounds that way. Or not.

What I don’t get is that Owens — clearly — doesn’t seem to grasp the notion that Harrison is not only employed as an analyst, but that it’s also his job to make people angry. In other words: grow up, TO. No, seriously, guy, grow up.

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OK, OK. Pete Carroll didn’t actually say that. He did however — kind of, anyway — Tweet that. Yes, that’s right: more ambiguous Twitter stories!

Carroll’s tweet is a little more awkward than TO’s, however — the Southern Cal coach routinely chooses a “SOTD” (Song of the Day). No big deal, right? Well, that all depends on how you interpret this tweet from Monday:

#SOTD kids aren’t alright by offspring: http://bit.ly/12Enze

Yes, that’s right: The Kids AREN’T Alright. Now, I suppose one could interpret that Carroll is saying “my poor players here at USC are not doing OK after losing to Washington.” I suppose. Or, more likely, not.

You see, Carroll’s legacy is starting to get questioned in college football circles because of losses like these.(Aside: I think, regardless of how much talent he has and how many “little” games he’s lost, that it’s kind of silly to say such things about a guy who’s won a pair of championships for the Trojans. That’s like saying Bobby Cox should be questioned with his work as Braves manager.)

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Anyone watching football yesterday knows two obvious things: 1) Terrell Owens improves the Bills passing attack. 2) Tony Romo is less effective without Owens.

Now, the second part wasn’t immediately obvious after Week 1 because Romo looked awesome against a hapless Bucs team (admittedly, yes, the same hapless Bucs team that Owens and Lee Evans scored against), but it was obvious yesterday on Sunday Night Football as Romo laid an egg against the Giants during the opening for the Cowboys’ new stadium.

Naturally, TO had something to say about the whole affair. Well, kind of — I’m assuming that a “retweet” does count as “saying something” right? (Because it should.)

RT @mcgowanboi: @terrellowens Dallas just found out they had a T.R. problem not a T.O problem !!

TO let that hang out there for a few hours before offering up a fake-sounding, albeit apologetic, tweet of his own:

Look, I’m nt gonna say anything bad about the cowboys, I hate tht sum of my boys played hard & they lost! Hope my boy MB is ok!! Nite!

OK, let’s just move on from the whole “Romo v. Owens” thing, as well as the Cowboys issues with their QB  — these are obvious; we don’t need to discuss them — and focus on whether a retweet counts as Owens actually saying something, because I tend to think that’s the issue at stake here, right? (For those Twitter illiterate: A retweet essentially means you are re-broadcasting what someone else already said on the service. In this case, @mcgowanboi said that line to TO, and then TO retweeted it for all his followers to see.)

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Jim Larranaga is done with Twitter. 4EVA. OK, maybe not forever, but he’s at least temporarily stepping away from social media after a recent dust-up involving bagels and cream cheese (the crux being that “Coach L” made fun of the NCAA’s rules by joking on Twitter that he was allowed to give his players bagels but not cream cheese). Steinberg has more:

“Tongue in cheek, I made a comment that has been blown out of proportion and used to fuel some other columns, and I didn’t feel good about that….” Larranaga told [radio dude Mike] Wise. “There’s reasons for these rules, and I poked a little bit of fun, but it got out of hand. I said, ‘Well, that kind of ends my twittering.’ I’m too busy now to work with my own team to keep doing these things.”

D.C. Sports Bog thumbed him down, and I’m going to go ahead and sling the same review. It’s not that Coach L needs to step away from Twitter, he just needs to realize that there is NO JOKING IN SOCIAL MEDIA, for crying out loud.

No, no, but seriously, I actually think Coach L is making a good move. He also quoted the Terminator stating that “I’ll be back,” which is the right play. He certainly doesn’t need to remove himself from social media, but there’s no reason to stick himself squarely in the fire after already catching so much heat; right now, people are still figuring what the hell is going on with Twitter and the blogs and the googlez and one day, we’ll all live freely once the social media revolution actually takes place.

Or something like that. I don’t mean to say he should give up — seriously, no one should quit Twitter or ban followers just because they don’t like the reaction of the general public, but these are shady times for the NCAA and Twitter and if I were getting my cohones hazed by my university for something I said about bagels, I’d probably take a step back and rethink whether I wanted to be broadcasting my thoughts that publicly.

So, lots of Twitter news coming down the line yesterday. (Which I know you all just love!) There was the ESPN memo. There was the Denver post calling out J.R. Smith for supposed gang-related tweets.  There was some NFL teams taking a hard stance against what their players can and can’t do on the platform — including the Chargers fining Antonio Cromartie for a tweet about the poor food at camp.

But the most ridiculous news bit to emerge Tuesday? Twelve NFL teams decided to go against the league’s recommendation of letting reporters tweet/blog from camp, and instead, banned it.

This is just silly.

Even Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star — a guy that’s not on Twitter and has never blogged, and is about as old school as they come in the media game — knows how wrong this policy is.

“I think several teams (that prohibit it) look at practice more as an educational opportunity for the media as opposed to a coverage issue,” Aiello said.

Yes, well, thanks for the education, but we’d like to serve our readers, the fans, the people who pay your salaries.

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One reason I’ve heard for the blogging/tweeting prohibition is that teams don’t want reporters sending out erroneous information based on what they see. Teams want to have time for the coach to address those issues, maybe set the record straight on what happened to Player X.

Which is ridiculous.

At training camp, where practices are open to the public, nothing is off-limits. If an assistant coach verbally dresses down a rookie, a fan can tweet it. If a player twists his left ankle, a fan can blog it.

Yeah, and that’s the thing here: if the media isn’t tweeting away — people with credible names, those that strive for truth and accuracy in reporting — someone else siting in the stands will. And those people in the stands won’t have access to PR people and coaches and players, so it’s easier for misinformation to slip through the cracks via the common fan. Wouldn’t NFL teams be better served to allow reporters to be the filter on this information? Those that do it for a living and perhaps have a better grasp of things?

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The NFL always releases the “Fantasy Files” commercials around this time, with various NFL’ers doing cr-cr-craaaaazy things on the football field. They are quite awesome. But not as awesome as the following video, featuring Chris and Tanner Cooley Colt Brennan playing the roles of Jason Witten and Tony Romo in a mock-up of a Fantasy Files commercial. Watch, enjoy and then we’ll discuss.

OK, so here’s the thing: this appears to be unprovoked, right? I mean, Witten and Romo are easy targets and it is Redskins-Cowboys, but still, totally unprovoked if I recall correctly.

Which is exactly what makes this so awesome — Cooley wants to ramp up the rivalry, but instead of just dogging Romo’s inability to lock up Jessica Simpson or hold onto the ball late in games, he simply ruled on the two Cowboys players for being rednecks and jealous of not having a fantasy files commercial. And he did it in a really, really, really funny way. Oh yeah, and he also created the hysterically awesome “J-Wit” nickname (although I think “J-Wizzle” would have been better). Just another +1000 Internet day in the life of Chris Cooley, really.