One of the most highly anticipated events for any sports fan, outside of actual games, is the draft for that particular sport, a night which is always exciting as teams have a chance to pick out the stars of tomorrow. This project will look at Twitter’s reaction to the draft by examining the sentiment of tweets about two different teams over the 24 hours following the end of the draft.

The teams selected for this project were the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers. The Bengals had one of the most anticipated (and criticized) choices in the draft, while the Steelers are Cincinnati’s biggest rivals. So about which team does the Twittersphere feel more positive following the draft?

Data was collected using the rtweets package to scrape 1000 tweets that are “at” each team. Tweets were not retrieved that just mentioned the word “Bengals” or “Steelers.” These tweets will then be taken apart, word by word, and have sentiments assigned to them.

Inquiry 1: Positivity

First, which team’s draft selections were viewed more positively, based on the sentiment of tweets at that team during and immediately following the draft?

Team Name Total Positive Total Negative
bengals 579 385
steelers 702 403

The first graph looks at the average positivity of tweets about each team, with positivity simply calculated as number of positive words in any tweet less negative words. The table shows the total number of positive and negative words used in the 1000 tweets about each team.

This analysis shows a generally more favorable consensus towards the Steelers, as they had both a higher average positivity and more positive words said in total. The table also shows that tweets about the Steelers tended to be more emotional, with over 1100 positive or negative words to just 950 for the Bengals within the same number of tweets.

Inquiry 2: Other Sentiments

Next, let’s explore which sentiments were most prevalent for each team, and how the most common sentiments compared - were both fanbases generally optimistic? Or was one largely positive while the other was more negative?

Cleraly, tweets about the Steelers contained far more emotion than those about the Bengals, as the Steelers are higher in nearly every emotion, other than surprise. However, it is notable in which categories the Bengals are closest to the Steelers - Anger, Fear, Negative, and Surprise. While positivity is still the most prevalent emotion among tweeets about the Bengals, it should be noted that theirs appear to be far more negative than those of the Steelers, perhaps pointing to fan disapproval of their draft choices.

Inquiry 3: Passage of Time

Finally, let’s see if the passage of time has caused any change in the emotions toward each team. It should be noted on the following graph that the 0 point on the graph below represents 5:30 pm Eastern Time on Friday, April 31, and that tweets continue for about 22 hours after.

Interestingly, the most positive tweets take place around 1:30 am ET Saturday, well after the second day of the draft (Friday) had finished. It’s possible that these tweets represent Bengals fans digesting the second day of the draft and finding it to be satisfactory.

The earlier spike, occurring at about 11:30 pm, comes just shortly after the selection of Joseph Ossai in the third round. Ossai was a player predicted to be picked early in the second round, or even sneak into the first, so clearly Bengals fans were excited when he fell to their team.

Also, as mentioned before, the dominant trend for tweets about the Bengals was positivity, despite some negative sentiments. This explains why every bar is positive throughout the period, with the exception of one outlier that occurred late at night and is being influenced by just a few negative tweets.