Twitter: Be There Without Being There

Yes, I'm a believer. Twitter rocks. Twitter's awesome. And… it’s a sports fan’s best friend.

Case in point: last Sunday's NFC Championship game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. Now while most fans were tuning into ESPN or the NFL Network to get their pregame information (including lots of season recap stuff, network plugs, commercials, and other boring filler brought to you from a studio somewhere NOT in New Orleans), I spent my pre-game getting real-time updates from reporters AND PLAYERS that were actually in New Orleans, reporting on the game or getting ready to PLAY in the game. And that my friends, is the power of Twitter.

Now the updates you receive are only as good as the people you follow, but as Twitter continues to grow in popularity, journalists and athletes (as well as celebrities, politicians, and others) are catching on. And for Sunday’s game, there was no shortage of sports reporters or athletes who were tweeting updates leading up to kick-off (NFL players are not allowed to tweet 90 minutes before kick-off and cannot resume tweeting until post-game interviews are complete).

The most informative and entertaining updates (I prefer to say update instead of tweet) provided on Sunday came from Vikings’ offensive tackle Bryant McKinnie. Through his updates, 11,538 followers including myself, were able to get an inside glimpse of what it’s like for a player leading up to the biggest game of his career.

Here are a few of his updates from the night before and the morning of the game:

5:59 PM Jan 23rd: back in our rooms from team meeting, im about 2 go 2 bed shortly so i can get plenty of rest. Helloa 2 all the new followers!

7:05 PM Jan 23rd: Ok they just checked 4 curfew and i just read a chapter of The Prayer that Changes Everything by Stormie Omartian. Time 4 Bed!

6:36 AM Jan 24th: i got a good nights rest last nite! gonna head down 4 brunch in a hour then team meeting after that!

McKinnie also posted some links to pictures as well (on the team bus), but the most entertaining post came shortly after the team meeting the morning of the game:

8:16 AM Jan 24th: Yall will never guess who was just @ our team meeting! We needed this!

And linked to this update was the following video, recorded inside the team meeting just hours before kick-off: Larry Platt performing “Pants on the Ground” for the Minnesota Vikings. Need I say more?