Roddy White jumped on the twitter horn Sunday morning to share his reactionary thoughts to the weird thing happening where San Francisco’s Aldon Smith was going to play despite having been arrested for DUI a few days prior. In particular, White didn’t like the way the pregame shows were covering the story:

The pregame shows didn’t like White’s tweets, unsurprisingly, and the message was that White, who has a history of tweeting sometimes cringe-worthy messages (telling the jurors in the George Zimmerman case to “kill themselves” being probably the most egregious example), should be quiet and focus on the game ahead.

While I can’t endorse White’s offseason tweet about the Zimmerman jurors, I think Roddy is thinking about the game ahead when posting tweets he knows will draw national attention to him during the season.

White is the ostensible “number one receiver” on the Falcons. True, Julio Jones would be the “number one receiver” on many other NFL teams, and Old Tony Gonzales and Harry Douglas aren’t bad options either. There’s a reason we refer to a team’s “receiving corps,” however: they function as a unit. The arithmetic of the game generally allows defenses to shut down the passing attack of a team with only one good passing option. (This fact makes Calvin Johnson’s accomplishments in Detroit all the more impressive.)

The important fact here is that White is playing with a high ankle sprain that appears to be significantly limiting him during games. He continues to play, though, because as the team’s ostensible “number one receiver,” he will draw defenders away from Jones, Gonzales, and Douglas. White’s decoy role is even more important following the injury to running back Steven Jackson.

White’s effectiveness as a decoy depends, in some part, on the extent to which he is on the minds of defensive coaches and players as they prepare for and play games against the Falcons. Within reason, anything White can do to draw attention to himself– even just keeping his name, but not his injury, of course, in the news– should result in some benefit to his team. That may be the reason his team has never (publicly) reprimanded him for his outspoken ways.