Welcome to the Wednesday edition of The Cooler, where I will try to keep things separated into short, digestible segments so you can get through this without needing a break. Let's get to it:
*Kliff Kingsbury is 39, just a few years younger than me, and likewise straddles the line between generations. He was born in 1979 so technically he's one of the youngest members of Generation X, but those just a year or two younger than him are classified as Millennials. And pretty much every player he oversees as the new head coach of the NFL's Cardinals is a Millennial.
That generation is much-discussed and sometimes maligned — fairly at times, unfairly others. What we should all agree upon is that those born between 1981 and 1996 grew up in a much different world than those older than them thanks in large part to the explosion of the Internet — and the related things it like social media.
The rest of us have adapted to those things; Millennials came of age with those things and experience them differently as a result.
As such, Kingsbury is trying something with the Cardinals that he did with even younger players at Texas Tech: he's giving them a "cellphone break" after about 20 or 30 minutes of team meetings in an attempt to make sure they are focused when the meetings are happening. He's blunt about the reason why:
"You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix, so we'll let them hop over there and then get back in the meeting and refocus," Kingsbury told reporters recently.
Whether you think this is a smart way of understanding the different needs and mind-set of a younger generation … or acquiescing far too much to a group of adults that should be able to sit still and listen probably depends on how you feel about Millennials and management in general.
Maybe 50 years ago players got breaks to smoke cigarettes?
