A Tale of Two Games: Patriots Fans Go Through Major Mood Swing
The Patriots did a 180 this week, rebounding from a pathetic performance vs. the Chiefs last Monday night to throttle the previously undefeated Bengals. Typically a reasonable bunch, Patriots fans twice lost their minds, once to bury Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, and the second time to come screaming to their defense.
Visceral reactions from sports fans aren’t new, but we can quantify them now. The word or hashtag “Patriots’’ or “Pats’’ was included in more than 863,894 Tweets worldwide from Monday, Sept. 29th through Monday, Oct. 6th at 11 a.m., according to the people at Crimson Hexagon, who can track these things. Despite the up-and-down nature of the week, the Patriots ran at a plus-6 percent net sentiment for the week, meaning there was more positive than negative conversation (excluding news sharing or other neutral conversation).
The conversation peaked when the Pariots were at their worst. On Sept. 29 at 9 p.m., when the Chiefs were building up to their 17-0 halftime lead, there were 56,936 posts tagging the team. It was almost equally high at 10 p.m., with 56,784 posts. The graph below shows the total number of tweets on each day, with the green ones indicating a positive reaction, gray indicating neutral, and red negative.
On that dark Monday in KC, the net sentiment of conversation was 9 percent negative. Yesterday, after the Patriots beat the Bengals, 43-17, the conversation was 19 percent positive. Thats a 28 percent shift in net sentiment for one week, and a clear sign that the lens through which we view and discuss our teams is highly dependent on what we’ve just witnessed.
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