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A study by Emory Sports Marketing Analytics ranks the Indianapolis Colts' fan base as the second most emotionally stable among the 32 NFL teams.
At the start of the 2013 season, the group at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School looked at Twitter data from last year to determine the emotional state of fans following wins and losses.
Here’s how researchers described their methods:
"We collected the tweets from Monday (one day after the game), Tuesday (two days after the game), and Wednesday (three days after the game). We then analyzed each tweet and characterized its content as positive or negative. Next, we calculated the overall sentiment (roughly the indexed ratio of positive to negative tweets) of the related tweets for each of the three days."
They repeated the process for each week of the season, for all 32 teams, and determined the happiest after a win (New Orleans), the saddest after a loss (Pittsburgh), the most stable (Dallas) and the most unstable (Oakland).
The Colts’ fan base ranked No. 2 behind Dallas in the most stable category. According to the researchers:
"We measured 'stability' by looking at the difference between average sentiment after wins and average sentiment after losses. Dallas Cowboys’ fans seemed to never get too negative after losses, nor were they tremendously positive after wins. Colts’ fans were even more understanding after a loss, but more positive on average than Cowboys’ fans after a win. This could be due to the Colts being a young team that did not have high expectations going into the 2012 season."
After Dallas’ collapse Sunday afternoon, under the weight of two late interceptions by quarterback Tony Romo, is the Cowboys fan base still on such an even keel?
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