Sentiment Analysis on NFL Teams

The NFL Draft was last week, and it brought a lot of excitement to NFL fans and the futures of their favorite NFL teams. Every fan has an opinion about the players that get drafted and how they affect each team’s upcoming season. Two teams that have been at the forefront of draft conversation are the New York Jets and the New York Giants. Both teams have been pretty bad for the last few years, and they are always talked about during the draft, both for good picks and bad picks.

2022 Draft

Both the Jets and Giants picked early in the first round of this year’s draft, and there was a lot of hype surrounding their picks. I want to do a sentiment analysis on tweets about these two teams and see how people were feeling about the respective picks.

With their first pick in the draft, the Jets selected Cincinnati corner back Sauce Gardner at #4 overall. The Giants picked Oregon’s edge rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux with the very next pick. The first question I want to answer is “Were the reactions on Twitter surrounding the Jets’ or Giants’ first pick positive or negative?” The data used for this analysis was pulled from Twitter in the minutes following each pick. Let’s look at the Jets’ pick:

Disclaimer: Graphic language appears on this graph

Overall, it looks like Twitter’s reaction directly following the pick was more negative than positive. Keep in mind, these are only the tweets that tagged the Jets in the post. Now let’s look at the Giants’ pick:

For the Giants, the reaction seems to be about even between positive and negative. So relative to the Jets, there is some more positivity surrounding the Giants’ first round pick of Kayvon Thibodeaux. The results of this are interesting. As a neutral fan watching the draft and scrolling through my own Twitter feed, the reactions to these picked seemed mostly positive. This goes to show how vast the Twittersphere is and how much content there is that we don’t see.

NFL Stadiums

Another key part of the NFL is the stadiums and atmospheres that the games are played in. Not only can the crowd and atmosphere help the home team during the game, but the stadium can provide an incredible gameday experience for the fans. I want to look at two rival teams, the Cincinnat Bengals and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and see what kind of sentiment there is about each team’s home stadium on Twitter.

First let’s look at the most used words regarding each stadium. The graph below shows the 10 most used words in tweets about Paul Brown Stadium:

There are some random words here, but the most used word was “beautiful”, which is a good sign for people who enjoy the stadium.

Now let’s look at Heinz Field:

There are some conflicting words here, as we see both “amazing” and “bad” used multiple times.

Sentiment

Now I want to look at how much positivity or negativity there is in the tweets about the two stadiums. Let’s look at Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Bengals:

It looks like there is a lot of positivity when people tweet about Paul Brown Stadium. Based on the words in the graph, the excitement looks like it is surrounding the stadium conditions and gameday experience, which is great news for the Bengals. A good team will bring the fans in, but a top notch experience in the stadium will keep them coming back.

Now for Heinz Field, home of the Steelers:

There is slightly more positive than negative when we look at tweets about Heinz Field, but not as much positivity as Paul Brown Stadium.