Whitworth: Tweet an inside joke gone bad

Oh, the power of the "send" button.

A tweet that went out on the Twitter account of Bengals left tackle Andrew Whitworth intimated that Whitworth had had a conversation with team president Mike Brown regarding his future with the team and the conversation didn't go so well.

Or maybe the conversation never happened.

That's what Whitworth said was the case Wednesday night when contacted by Fox Sports Ohio. According to Whitworth, his wife Melissa thought it would be funny to reply to a message from one of his teammates. She thought it was a text. It wasn't. Instead the message went viral on Twitter via Whitworth's account.

The tweet, now protected, said that Brown had told Whitworth he was done with the Bengals and that Whitworth’s reaction would be to sit out the season. None of it was true.

"Melissa accidentally text a teammate back while I was in the shower thinking it was just a text," said Whitworth in a text message to FSO. "She was joking and had no idea it was going to Twitter. She feels terrible but hey, we all make mistakes."

Whitworth deactivated his account shortly after realizing what had happened because he thought he had been hacked. He reactivated it later when Melissa admitted to being the unsuspecting culprit.

Whitworth, a second-round draft pick in 2006 out of LSU, is entering the final year of his current contract with the Bengals. He has turned into one of the top left tackles in the NFL and was named second-team All-Pro by the Associated Press last season. The Bengals still used their first two picks in last weekend's draft to select offensive linemen Cedric Ogbuehi of Texas A&M and Jake Fisher of Oregon.

Right tackles Andre Smith and Eric Winston are also entering the final years of their contracts.

It all was enough to raise speculation about the future of all three veterans in Cincinnati.

Whitworth invited the two rookies to his house this past Saturday when both were in town. Ogbuehi couldn't make it because of travel plans but Fisher took Whitworth up on the invite.

Whitworth addressed his work situation on Monday during a media session at Paul Brown Stadium. Whitworth is taking part in the team's offseason workout program

"Yeah, you're wondering what's going on and what the deal is but at the end of the day, I believe in the system of NFL football and I believe that as long as I play at the level I play and work the way I work, it's always my job," said Whitworth. "I'm not a guy that needs to be buttered or told that you're good at something and you're not. I think I have a good understanding of that. I know the level of play I want to play at, and I feel if I can play at that level, then I'll still be there.

"People are reacting a lot of different ways but at the end of the day, I'm me. And if you ever thought I'd be anything other than that, you don't know me very well."