Patriots Fans Have Some of the Worst Spelling in the NFL
PATRIOTS FANS IN THE SNOW. PHOTO VIA KENYEE / FLICKR
Patriots fans are many things: passionate; gregarious; fiercely loyal to the Holy Trinity of Belichick, Brady, and Kraft; immune to Gillette Stadium’s subzero climes come playoff time; and according to a study published in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, not the strongest writers.
Automated proofreading company Grammarly ranked each NFL franchise’s fans by mistakes made per 100 words, using algorithms to review 150 reader comments, each at least 50 words long, on each of the news sections of each team’s website, averaging roughly 12,728 words per team. Patriots fans ranked fourth worst behind fans of the Washington Redskins, New Orleans Saints, and AFC East division rival Miami Dolphins. At 16.5 mistakes per 100 words, Redskins fans’ writing skills were so abysmal, they scored 30 percent worse than second-place Saints fans.
Detroit Lions fans had the fewest errors, despite having a guy named Ndamukong Suh on the team’s roster until just recently. That’s as good as a Super Bowl, right? Jacksonville Jaguars fans were found to be the most loquacious, clacking away an average of 103 words per comment. Everyone deals with perennial disappointment differently–Jets fans boo the draft, Eagles fans hurl batteries, and Jags fans write treatises on Blake Bortles.
“It should be noted that there was no real correlation between losing and grammar/spelling errors, as the New England Patriots fans were the fourth worst in Grammarly’s sample,” notes Geoff Foster of WSJ.
It would be interesting to see how the rankings would look if Grammarly took into account comments made elsewhere on the web, rather than each team’s website. Fan blogs ought to be a treasure trove. In addition, there’s no way of verifying fandom on these team sites, so Patriots fans’ poor grammar could very easily be attributed to some undercover Dolphins fans.
NFL fans as a whole aren’t the greatest writers either. An earlier Grammarly study found that football fans had more errors per 100 words (9.9) than NHL and NBA fans (both 8.2). Still, NFL fans pale in comparison to NBA (10.3) and NASCAR fans (10.5). As it turns out, git-r-done doesn’t pass Grammarly’s smell test.
