Follow Me! Cowboys Players on Twitter

NFL players today are more accessible than they’ve ever been, thanks in large part to new social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. ‘Follow’ an athlete and you’ll get access to the players in a way not possible before. You can have "conversations" with them, you can read along as they interact with their friends and followers, you can see the pictures they take and even videos they post, and all of it live, direct and unfiltered. You can even get direct feedback on a post you made, like the picture on the right shows (You're very welcome, Mr. Sensabaugh).

Tweeting Athletes, a nice resource providing an easily accesible overview of professional athletes with twitter accounts, shows that there are 916 people with NFL ties who are tweeting (Including former players and NFL draft prospects, but excluding front office staff like @realjerryjones), more than in any other sport.

Almost half the Cowboys roster, 30 players, have a twitter account. The most followed player is Miles Austin with more than 100,000 people keeping up with his hectic travel schedule and his frequent twittering of whatever song lyrics are going through his head at any given moment. Thanks to Twitter, we also know that Marion Barber likes to quote scripture, and Jason Witten is putting up obstacle courses for his young son to get him jump started for a career in his father's footsteps. All 30 players, as well as the highlights of what some of them have been tweeting, after the break.

Personally, I don’t follow a single Cowboys player, heck, I don’t even have a twitter account. I occasionally leaf through a player’s tweets/twitters/twitterings to see if any of the players have a reaction to a piece of Cowboys news, but other than that it I always find it a bit awkward going through those tweets. I feel a little like I’m eavesdropping on a bunch of personal stuff that really isn't intended for "fans" to see.

But sometimes the occasional tweet provides a level of insight into player that would not otherwise have been possible. Reading through all of these often semi-private tweets you get a better appreciation for the person behind the athlete, for their concerns, their insecurities, what they laugh about, what car they drive (Dez drives a white Bentley), what presents they got their kids etc., and you begin to realize they're people just like you and me, only with a marginally bigger paycheck.

So today I put all awkwardness aside and went trolling through the Cowboys player tweets. Here are some of the tweets that caught my attention´:

Careful what you're saying. If you thought the players don’t at least drop by BTB or SB Nation occasionally, think again. The picture at the top of the post makes it clear that Gerald Sensabaugh dropped by at least once, and even Chris Gronkowski quoted an SB Nation article recently:

Players talking about their coaches. Here's a twitter exchange between Jessey Holley (Mr4thAndLong) and Kevin Ogletree (KOforPrez) discussing Mike Woicik. Sensabaugh weighs in on Rob Ryan.

Free life advice. Cowboys player also like to dispense quality life advice to us fans. Can't really argue with any of it.

Barry Church is bored:

Martellus Bennett takes pleasure from an unlikely source:

The weight room: where players spend a lot of their offseason time

Finally, a thought by Tashard Choice that is echoed in various forms by almost all players at one time or another:

I love Sunday mornings. God is good all the time. What a life I live. What a great family I have but what a wonderful God I serve. Be bless

Here’s a list of all the Cowboys players with a Twitter account that I’m aware of. They are ranked by number of followers. * denotes accounts that have been inactive for quite some time.

We know that more than 2,500 of you follow BTB on Twitter, but do you follow an NFL player on Twitter? Or do you follow any news sources with any regularity on Twitter? Let us know which it is in the attached poll, and feel free to express your thoughts on the twittering athlete in general as well.