Packers Draft Sentiment Analysis
Pat Lodes
5/5/2022
Introduction
The NFL Draft is one of the most important parts of the game of football. For all teams, the Draft is the best way they can improve not only for the next year, but for the many years to come. The Packers are a team that lives and dies by the NFL Draft as they do not usually rely on making marquee signings or trades during the offseason. This offseason, the Packers had already lost their star wide receiver Davante Adams. With Aaron Rodgers’ days as a star quarterback numbered, this year’s NFL Draft became incredibly important for the Packers to ace. With two picks in the first round, many were excited to see what the Packers were going to do. This analysis will look at Twitter reactions to the Packers first round picks, Quay Walker and Devonte Wyatt. I could not get instant tweet reactions for the picks, but I took tweets from the day following the draft. My goal is to compare the two picks in terms of sentiment and see how Twitter users viewed the Packers draft in general.
Question 1: What words/topics were coming up the most in review of the Packers first round picks?
When the Packers selected their first two picks in the NFL draft, there werew a couple topics that came to mind that this table does reflect. The biggest talking point was that the Packers drafted two players from the University of Georgia, and this is seen as both tables have georgia as a recurring word. As you look more in the table, you see another Georgia player in Lewis Cine who was also taken in the first round. I found it interesting to see how many people were tweeting about the Georgia players as this became a story of the first round. However, another thing I found interesting about these tables was that more twitter users were comparing players at Quay Walker’s position than Devonte Wyatt. By this, I mean that many of people tweeted about players the Packers could have picked over Quay Walker such as Nakobe Dean and Devin Lloyd, both of whom play linebacker like Walker. In Devonte Wyatt’s case, not many users talked about other defensive lineman the Packers could have picked, showing how not many people had complaints of the pick at first glance. The only thing I was suprised about was not many tweets talking about a wide receiver.
Question # 2: How did Twitter view the Packers two picks from a sentiment analysis?
My second question looks at the sentiment behind the reaction to the two picks in the first round. I wanted to see what people thought about the two picks from an emotional standpoint, and for the most part many of the fans were happy. First, Devonte Wyatt’s sentiment analysis was very good to see as many fans “loved” the selection. Many talked about him being elite and a top talent. Of the negatives in his analysis, many of the words actually were pretty good. “Savage” is a pretty great term to refer to a football player as being tough and monstrous is what teams want. “Desperately” refers to the fact that the Packers really needed to fill up a whole at Wyatt’s position. The only two that could be somewhat negative are defensive and strange. These terms are used likely because many people thought the Packers were going to select a wide receiver, so many likely tweeted how they thought it was strange that the Packers picked another defensive player.
The second sentiment analysis looks at the reaction to the selection of Quay Walker. While love was used many times in this sentiment analysis, there also was much worse negative sentiment words used in reaction to this pick. This kind of reaction to this pick makes sense as many fans expected the Packers to take a wide receiver or even trade this pick in exchange for an already established player in the NFL. And with looking at the past table, we already knew that many Packers fans thought of other possible linebackers the Packers should have taken over Walker. It will be interesting to see how the sentiment analysis changes over the course of these two players first seasons.
How did the sentiment and topics change from Day 1 of the draft to Day 2?
Ok, so the issue I had with my time question was that all of my tweets came at around the same time. This made it really difficult to show real sentiment change over time. However, I was able to scrape data from Day 2 of the draft, in which the Packers turned the tide of sentiment. As seen in the table and word map, the Packers traded up in the second round with the Vikings and selected a wide receiver, Christian Watson. I was very intrigued to see how the fans reacted to this pick and to see as to whether or not the pick was as popular or negative as the Day 1 picks.
In the analysis, I found that people LOVED the Christian Watson pick. While there still was some negative sentiment towards the pick as some may have wanted another Georgia player (wide receiver George Pickens), the majority of sentiment showed fans being excited, happy, and loving the pick. I think this pick shows how fans can change opinions in the matter of one pick. Many fans left the first round skeptical of the Packers not drafting a wide receiver, but once they did it led to massive amounts of positive sentiment.
