One ill-fated lapse in cyber-judgment by a college athlete has cost him his position on one of the top football teams in the country.
Buck Burnette, a sophomore at the University of Texas, was dismissed from the team earlier this month after posting a racially charged comment about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page.
Burnette said the comment was sent to him from a friend via text message and that he made a poor decision in posting the remark to his Web page.
The message appeared under the status update on his Facebook page. It read: all the hunters gather up, we have a [racial slur] in the White House, referring to Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
Burnette has since apologized and, in a written statement, called his action a “terrible decision.”
Longhorn coach Mack Brown said he had warned his players about the dangers of posting personal information on the Internet and called Facebook and other social networking websites “dangerous.”
