Facebook Follies Foil Trojans

We'd say we saw something like this coming back in December when we warned USC players to quit screwing around on the internets and start focusing on beating UCLA. All over the papers this morning is the story of the Facebook foibles of a handful of USC football players.

According to the Los Angeles Times, an inappropriate nickname for a Special Teams unit got its members in hot water when backup linebacker Clay Matthews Jr. turned it into a Facebook group called "White Nation" which included teammates Dallas Sartz, David Buehler and Brian Cushing.

Matthews, reached Thursday, said he used "poor judgment" in posting the page and that he "can totally see how it could be taken out of context."
He called it "a joke within the team" that should never have been made public because "it's misconstrued." The junior linebacker said he rooms with an African American, is "not a racist" and regrets posting anything about "White Nation" on the Web.

It is certainly not the first thing that has been posted on the internet with regrets.

Back in December, Matthew's teammate, Brian Cushing had some heavy editing done to his Facebook profile in the middle of the night, which inspired comments about the linebacker's inclusion in the Out Magazine July 2006 list of "Athletes We Wished Played for Our Team."

We don't know who made the edits or whether there's any fire behind their smoke, but we saved the screencap just knowing that some day, something from the online social network would, shall we say, blow up, in their faces.

UPDATE: According to our crack research team on Facebook, this story must be old news. Brian Cushing left the "White Nation" Facebook group at 7:42 PM on February 14...followed by David Buehler 16 minutes later. Somehow these details were left out of the Times coverage.