Are NFL players addicted to Instagram? Let the Colts explain

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INDIANAPOLIS — Stroll into the locker room before practice, or after practice, or 15 minutes after the coach’s postgame speech, and you’ll probably see them hunched over in their seats, shoulder pads still strapped, eyes fixed on the light buzzing from their phones. They’re scrolling. Liking. Posting.

Some post while they warm up on the field an hour before kickoff; some check it in their towels before they head to the shower; some chirp back at fans talking trash; some swear they hate it, that they’re over it, that they’re going to delete it off their phone as soon as ... then they don’t. They can’t.

“I've seen a study that says 90 percent of people our age check Instagram before they brush their teeth,” says Colts’ second-year cornerback Nate Hairston. “That’s what you call an addiction. Your breath stinks, and you’re already checking Instagram?”

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Instagram – the cool kids call it IG – is the NFL’s social media drug of choice in 2018, and it’s hard to see the Colts’ captivation with the app (18 of 22 starters are active users) as an anomaly. There’s a pretty good chance plenty of players on the league’s other 31 teams are hooked just the same. Probe a couple of Colts about life on IG as a professional athlete – its benefits, its pitfalls, why they can’t put it down – and you’ll walk into a world NFL players didn’t have to navigate 10, even five years ago. It can get them closer to their fans. It can get them dollars. It can also get them in trouble.

As for their infatuation, the Colts blame their age (all but five members of the 53-man roster are in their 20s), they blame their self-diagnosed A.D.D., they blame their unusual occupations – jobs that require them to spend untold hours at the team facility all week, locked into that Sunday’s opponent, walled off from most of the outside world. “Your life during the season is football, family, football, family,” explains tight end Eric Ebron. “Instagram lets us see what’s going on outside the building.”

Or, as former Colt and social media savant Pat McAfee puts it: “Football players are humans, too. Being in a brand new city with no friends outside of the locker room can get a bit lonely. Social media can make that process a lot easier.”

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Some use it for advertising. “Followers mean money,” points out linebacker Najee Goode. Some use it to boost their Pro Bowl candidacy. Some use it to hint at the team they hope signs them in free agency (ahem, Le’Veon Bell). Some use it to post photos of themselves in fancy clothing, with vague, semi-inspirational captions. Some sing. Some dance. Some raise money for charities. Some are still using a flip phone (ahem, Andrew Luck) and wouldn’t be caught dead using Instagram.

What they can’t deny: They’re on it all the time.

“We argue at least once a week about who’s on it the most,” Goode says.

So I pose the question to Ebron in the locker room one afternoon. He’s in good spirits, fresh off the best game of his career, a three-touchdown eruption against the Jags. (He’s posted seven times on Instagram in the four days that followed.) “Are NFL players addicted to this?” I ask him. Ebron takes the query seriously. He weighs it for a second, then shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he finally says.

His response loses a bit of credibility a moment later, when I happen to gaze down at his phone. Eric Ebron is trying to tell me he’s not addicted to Instagram at the very moment he’s scrolling through photos on Instagram.

“I was just eating!” he bellows in defense. “I had nothing to do!”

'An outlet for people to not get punched in the mouth'

They love it because they control it. With a few taps players can replace their public relations team, their agent, the media. It’s their message, their image, their words, unfiltered and untwisted and sent directly into the world.

“It’s replaced the need to have somebody else tell your story, and it’s replaced the possibility that you might get caught with a ‘gotcha’ question from the media,” says Andrew Selepak, a media professor at the University of Florida who oversees the school’s graduate program in social media. “You’re completely in control of your message from start to finish. Athletes love that.”

What players don’t love: the comments. “One time I posted a picture of me and my son at his football game and someone wrote, ‘You shouldn’t be smiling, you lost on Sunday,’” says Colts nose tackle Al Woods. “I don’t even reply. I just block ‘em or drop ‘em. I don’t have time for that (expletive).”

Same goes for Malik Hooker, the talented second-year safety. “Posted a video of me singing to music in my car, and they said I should be more worried about football than being a rapper,” he says. “And I’ve been hearing a lot this year about how I’m injury-prone, and about how I should have more interceptions.”

Hooker allows himself to tap back once in a while. “What coverage were we in?” he’ll ask when he reads a comment about his play that he doesn’t like.

The criticism comes with the job. Hooker knows this – he gets it. But it still gnaws at him. At one point earlier this season, he’d grown so irritated with the comments below his posts on Instagram that he considered unloading every social media app from his phone. Just one, giant purge.

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Weeks later, he still hasn’t found it in him to pull the trigger. “I feel like all social media is negative,” Hooker vents in the locker room one afternoon. “I hate it. I don’t like it. I wanna deactivate everything. The only thing holding me back are the fans. If I just left, they’d be like, ‘Where’d Malik go?’”

Chester Rogers, a third-year receiver for the Colts, used to not see the comments at all. He’d blocked them from his posts – wisely – but only after learning his lesson the hard way early on in his career. He used to read the comments. And the comments got to him.

“That type of (expletive) can get in your head,” Rogers says. “It can lure you in, and the next thing you know you’re arguing and cussing a fan out. Next thing you know there’s a story on the internet about you.

“You gotta be mature with this social media stuff,” he continues. “I’ve let stuff get to my head and started to question myself. I don’t remember the comment, but a lot of people say certain things, like, ‘Why’d you drop that pass?’ Then I’ll go to (the comments on) LeBron’s (page) and they’ll be talking about how he sucks, and he’s the best player in the world. You can’t really feed into that.”

(In just the past few weeks, Rogers has enabled the comments on his posts again.)

Selepak, the University of Florida professor, notes that NFL players are at the peak of their field – often the very best players on their high school and college teams – and aren’t accustomed to facing criticism from the general public. Their coaches? Sure. The media? Maybe. But not from @g_dad94.

“Especially from people who’ve maybe never even played the sport,” Selepak says. “It can be something that really impacts their mood and how they look at the platform. It can make them depressed, or even angry.”

Nyheim Hines has a solution: He deletes the app off his phone during game weeks. The Colts’ rookie running back re-downloads it only on Sunday nights to watch highlights. He learned his lesson in the preseason, a rocky stretch for Hines in which he fumbled the football four times in four games. The comments were less than kind. He thought it best to shut himself off from social media.

“That’s the first time I thought about saying something back to (commenters),” Hines says. “But why would I? It’s a lose-lose situation. I’m gonna jeopardize my career by putting something bad on social media. My family taught me better. Especially me, I was already struggling in the preseason. The last thing I needed was more negative attention.”

The one thing Woods, Hooker, Rogers and Hines all agree on: The vitriol spewing from the commenters is something they’d never utter to a player’s face. “Instagram, and all social media,” Ebron explains, “is an outlet for people to not get punched in the mouth for what they say.”

He clarifies: “You’re going to get ignorance. That’s just because of the people in this world. It’s a free country, so say what you want.”

‘It’s not real life’

It can be fun: When the Tennessee Titans posted a few weeks back that “The NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense resides in Nashville,” Ebron responded with a raised-eyebrow emoji. The Colts rolled over the NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense the following Sunday, 38-10.

Ebron 1, Titans 0.

It can be beneficial: McAfee has built a brand and highly successful post-football career largely through social media.

And it can be dangerous: Hines says he’s received messages from women, from people claiming to be long-lost family members, from those chasing cash for their GoFund me accounts.

“I think a lot of guys can get addicted to the attention,” Hines says. “Especially if they’re making plays and posting videos of themselves. Some guys will see the love they’re getting on Instagram and let it get to their head.”

“It can be really, really dangerous,” Woods adds. “There’s a lot of stuff people don’t need to see. Some things are just not meant to get out.”

Which is why Woods, a 10-year NFL veteran playing for his fifth team, has a rule. Come to a party at his house in Louisiana during the offseason, you leave your phone in a box at the door. “If I catch you with it the rest of the night, you’re kicked out,” he says.

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No photos. No videos. In other words: Nothing for Woods to worry about in the morning. “If someone’s having a really, really good time, that person doesn’t need a video of it showing up everywhere the next day,” he says. “They’re just trying to relax and unwind.”

Anthony Walker is a second-year Colt who speaks like a seventh-year Colt, especially when he says things like this: “We play for an organization, and when we’re on social media, we represent the Colts as well as our families back home.”

Not since McAfee’s infamous Instagram post from the Colts’ equipment room back in 2016 – a post he later said former GM Ryan Grigson tried to fine him a game check for – have any Colts stumbled into any real trouble on social media.

As for the current Colts, it doesn’t hurt that the team’s top two players, Luck and receiver T.Y. Hilton, aren’t even on the app.

For the rest, it’s their way of checking in on the world. They rep their brands. They show off their singing skills. They show off their kids. They support their teammates. They try to gather Pro Bowl support.

It’s a window into their lives that, if navigated shrewdly, can connect them more closely to the fanbase than ever before.

There’s also this, aptly pointed out by Hairston, the second-year cornerback: “It’s a façade. You only show what you want people to see. It’s not real life.”

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

COLTS ON INSTAGRAM

Below is a list of the handles of many of the Indianapolis Colts on Instagram and their approximate number of followers. The players have a collective reach of more than one million followers:

MIke Mitchell, iammikemitchell, 147,000

Jacoby Brissett, jbrissett7, 129,000

Eric Ebron, ericebron, 105,000

Malik Hooker, malikhooker24, 94,100

Najee Goode, all_goode52, 75,900

Jabaal Sheard, jabaalsheard, 65,600

Quincy Wilson, 6ix954, 58,900

Quenton Nelson, quenton_nelson, 40,000

Darius Leonard, mr_highflyter10, 27,400

Tyquan Lewis, primtime_Lewis, 26,000

Al-Quadin Muhammad, qua-nito, 25,100

Skai Moore, skaimoore10, 20,700

Marlon Mack, mdm_v5, 20,500

Chester Rogers, chester80rogers, 18,300

Nyheim Hines, thenyny, 18,000

Corey Moore, cdm_43, 16,400

Jordan Wilkins, jordanwilkins_30, 16,200

Dontrelle Inman, mrinman15, 14,700

Nate Hairston, finessinxv, 11,500

Anthony Walker, awalkerjr, 9,437

Matthew Adams, global_9, 9,207

Pierre Desir, pierredesir28, 7,230 

Evan Boehm, evan_boehm, 6,750

Zaire Franklin, zaire_, 6,724

Luke Rhodes, l_rhodes50, 6,317

Kenny Moore, kennymoore_ii, 6,130

Zach Pascal, okaysix_, 5,801

Chris Milton, cmilt_, 5,400

Braden Smith, bradensmith71, 5,256

Clayton Geathers, cgeathers26, 5,180

Al Woods, hulk337, 4,384

George Odum, da_real_goat_31, 3,911

Margus Hunt, margus.hunt, 3,898

Ryan Hewitt, ryanbew, 2,807

Hassan Ridgeway, big_ridge1, 2,391

Denzelle Good, dgood77, 2,197