Applaud Arian Foster for Calling out Colin Cowherd on Fantasy Football Tweet

When Houston Texans running back Arian Foster re-aggravated his left hamstring in Saturday's game against the San Francisco 49ers, fantasy football GMs with Foster on their rosters let out a collective gasp.

Some took to Twitter to express their fears about their respective teams, and some directed that fear directly at Foster.

That includes ESPN's Colin Cowherd, who attempted to speak on behalf of all Foster-owning GMs with a glib tweet expressing his selfish concerns:

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"Hey Arian Foster--- 'We really do care about you as a human too. Um,now about that hammy? --signed, everybody"

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Foster responded brilliantly, might I add:

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"Did you want to be a critic as a child? Or did your dreams die with your humility?"

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Granted, Foster likely received many tweets from panicked fantasy footballers about his hamstring and his "day-to-day" progress in healing from it. But there is a difference between the average fan and fantasy football player and a so-called "professional" sports media personality.

Unfortunately, Cowherd is a moron, and using the word "professional" in regard to him should be done so lightly.

Real-life NFL players don't, as a rule, care about your fantasy team. They shouldn't have to. They aren't taking the field to get you points so you can crush your coworker on Sunday and rub it in his face on Monday. They want that extra 10 yards because that means another first down for their teams, not because it's another point in your matchup against Dan from accounting.

And they certainly don't want you turning their real-life injuries, body parts, and on-field experiences into self-serving abstractions and then forcing that abstraction down their throats, via thousands of "You'd better start all season long, I used my No. 1 pick on you!" tweets.

Cowherd, a person paid to have a degree of neutrality and to understand the not-so-subtle nuances of sport, should, at the very least, have some degree of awareness of this fact.

That Cowherd even equivocated within his tweet that he cares about Foster "as a human too," means he realized what he was doing, abstracting Foster and his hamstring into a pile of stats and selfish worry; yet he did it anyway.

Further, Cowherd works with athletes constantly. He should be not just aware, but sensitive to, their injury issues, and know how to speak about those issues with tact.

Of course, "Cowherd" and "tact" generally only appear in the same sentence when discussing his lack of it, so I really should not be surprised about his lack of both intelligence and sensitivity when reacting to Foster's hamstring pull.

Fantasy football makes fans take players' real-life injuries very personally, but it's not really personal to fans; it's personal for the man who just saw his season truncated or ended, his career shortened, his paychecks dwindle with one freak play that cost him his hamstring or worse.

And it's certainly not personal for a sports personality like Cowherd, until he took it there with Foster.

Foster is likely echoing the sentiments of many players in the league who are bombarded with tweets from fantasy GMs worried about their injuries and how they will affect their teams' performances.

But there's a reason why he chose to call out Cowherd rather than just a random fan: Cowherd should know better.