The abbreviations and broken English were apparently a good natured round of social media fun between the two Rams players, as clarified by Chris Long in a subsequent tweet. All Rams players are back at work now, focused on carrying the team to its first winning season since 2006. Let's hope this is the year, or the Twitter beefs are gonna get real ugly. - Ed.
Anyone who thinks @Tayaustin01 and I are doing anything but joking around on twitter should log off.. I'm nauseous reading my mentions
— Chris Long (@JOEL9ONE) April 22, 2014
What seemed like a harmless reply to a Tweet about a lovely Spring day in the city of St. Louis took an odd turn on Sunday when Rams wide receiver Tavon Austin had an interesting reply to a retweet from defensive end Chris Long.
"Wya." That’s quite the response to a simple retweet from Chris, who obviously agrees that it’s nice to be in St. Louis. Maybe it was the weather, maybe Easter, or potentially it felt good to be back in St. Louis where the Rams were to begin their offseason program the very next day. Football is in the air! So is what Chris would call "%drama." But it didn’t stop there ...
And then Chris did what you’d expect/want him to do. He took the high road. He attempted to bury the Twitter %hatchet by stating he’s fortunate to play alongside Tavon, and that this all must be some kind of misunderstanding. To get a feel for how this response was received, Chris gave it another shot on Monday...
Awwww snap! You didn’t hear, Chris? You’re always playing around, but Tavon doesn’t have time for it! Except for, again, the fact that he does. If you don’t get the message, Chris, maybe being sub-tweeted will send a more important message ...
Are you subtweeting him, brah? Nah, Tavon’s not subtweeting. And he’s certainly not afraid to let Chris know it. Apparently, when the two encountered each other during Monday’s conditioning program, Chris said nothing to the Rams’ second year receiver and turned his head ... like a "chump."
And as of an hour ago [at 12:30am EST] this was Tavon’s last tweet. Nothing direct. It might not even be related to the series of tweets highlighted above. Though we can all be pretty certain it is...
Regardless of how this ends, it’s really not what you’d like to see as a Rams’ fan. For outsiders, it’s probably fun, and is just one more reason to chuckle at a team who’s trying to climb it’s way out of the NFC West’s gutter. If you’re a fan of the team though, this kind of banter is far from productive, and not what you’d like to see in mid-April. This isn’t just a social media problem now ... it’s carried over to Rams’ Park. It’s certainly not the kind of material you hope to be reading after the first day of "voluntary" organized team activities.
As always, Turf Show Times will keep you updated as this Twitter "beef" progresses. You can follow us on Twitter at . You can follow Brandon Bate on Twitter at