Alright, so I decided I wanted to keep up with the NFL more closely this season. Everyone kept saying Twitter was the spot for instant news and chatter, so I figured I’d dive in and see how it goes using just that platform for my football fix.
Getting Started
First thing I did was pretty obvious. Opened up Twitter, typed ‘NFL’ into the search bar. Found the official account, the one with the blue checkmark. Hit follow. Seemed simple enough, right? Thought I was set.
Realizing the Problem
Pretty quick, I figured out just following the main NFL account wasn’t gonna cut it. It felt too… polished? Like just the big headlines and fancy videos. I wanted the real nitty-gritty, the team news, the stuff fans were actually talking about.
So, I started searching for specific teams. Followed my team, naturally. Then I thought, okay, let’s follow a couple of rivals too, just to see what they’re putting out there, maybe catch some banter. Then I went for player accounts. Followed a few big names I knew. That was a mixed bag – some guys tweet all the time, others barely touch it.
Information Overload
Man, my feed just blew up. Seriously. It was a mess. I had:
- Official NFL announcements
- My team’s hype posts
- Rival team propaganda
- Player thoughts (sometimes about football, sometimes random stuff)
- Reporter breaking news (or what they claimed was breaking news)
- Fans arguing back and forth
- Injury updates
- Fantasy football tips
It was just way too much stuff coming at me all at once. Especially on game days? Forget about it. Impossible to keep track of anything important.
Trying to Tame the Beast
So I thought, okay, maybe Lists could fix this mess. I’d heard about them but never really used them much. I decided to give it a shot.
I made a few:
- One list for ‘Official Stuff’ – put the main NFL account in there, plus guys like Schefter and Rapoport, the main news breakers.
- Another list for ‘My Team’ – just the official account and maybe a couple of trusted beat writers.
- A ‘Players’ list – threw the players I followed in there.
That did clean things up some. Flipping between lists was better than scrolling through the main chaotic feed. But honestly, even within the lists, the volume during peak times was still crazy high. Felt like trying to sip water from a fire hydrant.
What I Noticed
Doing all this, I started noticing the different flavors of these accounts. The official NFL account is very corporate, very careful. Team accounts are pure hype machines, everything is amazing, rah-rah-rah. Reporters are all about speed, sometimes they jump the gun, but they’re usually the first with scoops. Players are unpredictable – could be training pics, could be complaints about video games, could be deep thoughts. And the fan accounts… well, that’s a whole other level of wild.
Final Thoughts
End of the day, following the NFL on Twitter is… a lot. Gotta admit, it’s fast. You see stuff happen almost live. A big play, an injury update, a trade rumor – boom, it’s on Twitter seconds later. But filtering the signal from the noise is the real challenge.
You get tons of speculation, hot takes, and arguments mixed in with the actual news. Figuring out what’s real takes work though. You can’t just passively scroll. You gotta use lists, maybe mute certain words or accounts, really curate your experience.
So yeah, it works for staying plugged in, probably better than anything else for pure speed. But it’s not relaxing. It takes effort to manage it so you don’t just get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff flying around. It definitely showed me how information (and misinformation) spreads like wildfire on there.
