Ahead of the kick-off of the 2022-2023 NFL season, SportsHandle decided to take a deep dive into the worrying depths of Twitter. We set out with the goal of finding out how the best of the best athletes in one of the biggest and most beloved sports were targets of online abuse/negative comments on Twitter.
We scraped more than ten million tweets and extracted almost 8.5 million tweets in English directed at the top NFL players from the 2021-22 season kickoff (10 September 2021) up until the 15th of August 2022. On these tweets, we conducted sentiment analysis. This allowed us to conclude which players were targeted the most by negative tweets and who was getting the most ‘love’ from the fans out there.
Some of the key findings
- The majority of tweets analysed were deemed Neutral. Out of the almost 8.5 million tweets analysed, 43.5% were neutral towards any player, 39.5% were positive towards any player, and 17% were negative/abusive/insulting towards a player.
- All 80 players included in this analysis were targeted by negative tweets.
- Arizona Cardinals safety Budda Baker received the highest percentage of negative tweets, with 23.59% of tweets directed at him being deemed as negative.
- Los Angeles Chargers offensive tackle Rashawn Slater was the least targeted player by negative tweets with only 10.37% of tweets being negative.
- The 5 most frequently used insults/negative slurs are “rat”, “cow”, “fuck”, “shit”, and “bad”.
- Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers were the players with the most mentions, both overall and negative. They combined for a total of 378,823 negative tweets, which is 26,64% of all negative tweets directed towards these 80 players.
Looking at the list of players, the following table will display who received the greatest number of abusive tweets:
| Player | Total number of Negative tweets | Percentage of tweets which are negative | Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Brady | 214,586 | 17.06% | Tampa Bay Buccaneers |
| Aaron Rodgers | 164,237 | 19.61% | Green Bay Packers |
| Antonio Brown | 70,548 | 22.21% | FA |
| Deshaun Watson | 67,508 | 19.40% | Cleveland Browns |
| Josh Allen | 67,006 | 17.40% | Buffalo Bills |
| Joe Burrow | 66,286 | 14.82% | Cincinnati Bengals |
| Russell Wilson | 63,352 | 15.65% | Denver Broncos |
| Lamar Jackson | 63,194 | 18.11% | Baltimore Ravens |
| Odell Beckham Jr | 38,862 | 12.82% | FA |
| Tyreek Hill | 38,649 | 17% | Miami Dolphins |
Out of the 8,367,493 tweets scraped, 1,422,270 (16.99%) were deemed as negative. These 10 players ‘accounted’ for 854,228 (60,06%) of all the negative tweets scraped.
This list of players contains the players with the highest percentage of tweets which are deemed as negative:
| Player | Total number of Negative tweets | Percentage of tweets which are negative | Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budda Baker | 2,058 | 23.59% | Arizona Cardinals |
| Antonio Brown | 70,548 | 22.21% | FA |
| Tyron Smith | 2,773 | 22.12% | Dallas Cowboys |
| Alvin Kamara | 5,922 | 20.90% | New Orleans Saints |
| Darren Waller | 3,990 | 20.63% | Las Vegas Raiders |
| Aaron Jones | 10,493 | 20.36% | Green Bay Packers |
| Dak Prescott | 14,652 | 20.14% | Dallas Cowboys |
| Patrick Maholmes | 34,344 | 19.83% | Kansas City Cheifs |
| Dalvin Cook | 10,264 | 19.81% | Minnesota Vikings |
| Aaron Rodgers | 164,237 | 19.61% | Green Bay Packers |
It might not come as a surprise that a very outspoken and controversial player as Antonio Brown was the target of a lot of negative tweets and he ranks highly in both “total number of tweets” and “percentage of tweets which are negative”.
The following table shows the players with the lowest percentage of negative tweets directed at them. Considering the high amount of negative tweets targeting Odell Beckham Jr, it might come as surprise that he’s on this list, but the sheer percentage of the negative tweets is low.
| Player | Total number of Negative tweets | Percentage of tweets which are negative | Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rashawn Slater | 652 | 10.37 | Los Angeles Chargers |
| Austin Ekeler | 2,511 | 11.46 | Los Angeles Chargers |
| Aidan Hutchinson | 7,072 | 12.6 | Detroit Lions |
| Odell Beckham Jr | 38,862 | 12.82 | FA |
| Joel Bitonio | 556 | 12.93 | Cleveland Browns |
| Jordan Mailata | 1,262 | 13 | Philadelphia Eagles |
| Terron Armstead | 1,444 | 13.38 | Miami Dolphins |
| Kevin Byard | 2,787 | 13.45 | Tennessee Titans |
| Creed Humphrey | 2,577 | 13.99 | Kansas City Chiefs |
| Allen Robinson | 7,813 | 14.05 | Los Angeles Rams |
Methodology
We used an API (Application Programming Interface) to scrape 10 Million tweets related to NFL Players. We extracted only English tweets (8,637,493 tweets) and cleaned the data using Python programming language. The data cleansing consisted of the process of removing URLs, Hashtags, Mentions, Punctuation, Duplicates, Null Values, and special characters from tweets. Once the data was cleaned we used NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques, TextBlob Python Library to be more specific, to analyse the sentiments of the data.
TextBlob returns the polarity of a sentence. Polarity lies between [-1,1], where -1 defines a negative sentiment, and +1 defines a positive sentiment. Once we had all cleaned tweets labelled as positive or negative, we grouped the data by date and player and calculated the percentage of negative and positive tweets for each date and each player.
The players on this list represent the top 75 players in the NFL according to CBS Sports Senior Writer Pete Prisco, but also include five players that were assumed to be targeted by a high number of negative tweets. These five players were Deshaun Watson, Antonio Brown, Odell Beckham Jr, Ndamukong Suh and Ezekiel Elliott. This brought the total number of players up to 80.
The full data-set can be found here.
