Chad Ochocinco aka Chad Johnson has officially become the Gilbert Arenas of the NFL. By that, I mean the guy has become bigger for what he does off the athletic field than what he does on it, but he’s good enough for us to respect his work on the field. The difference is that Gilbert became the first athlete to maximize the reach of a blog while Chad’s using twitter. Oh yeah, and Chad’s taking his twitter game to a new level — that of NFL reporter.
After holding out for the first three weeks of the pre-season, Bengals first-round pick Andre Smith finally signed with the team. Where was the first place the news broke? Ocho’s twitter account. As if that wasn’t enough, Ocho also did some investigative journalism to check on the status of Tom Brady who got hurt in his pre-season game against the Redskins. Couple those two news items with Chad’s tweets reaching out to Barack and Oprah and it’s pretty clear that this guy is doing everything he can to build the Ocho brand.
Lastly, in case you missed it last week, Chad’s been trying to find a loophole in NFL policy so that he can tweet to his followers during games. His latest idea is to fly one of his fans to each game and develop a system of hand signals so that the fan can tweet on behalf of Ocho during games. Sure sounds like his head is in the right place, right? I guess this is only the next level up from touchdown celebrations.
