I am not sure about you, but today feels a lot like Christmas morning to me. Instead of a whole bunch of presents that say that they are from Santa, the NFL has given us a juicy season opener between the New Orleans Saints and the defending Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers.
Like many football fans, I enter pools to pick the winners of each game. For this season, I decided to go against my gut and rely on the wisdom of the social web. Using Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring tool (disclosure: Lithium gave me a research version of their tool to use for research on my blog) I pulled the weekly buzz for each of the league’s 32 teams on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forms; and plotted them into a series of formulas (conversation share, net promoter score, Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score, positive and negative conversation shares). All sentiment was assigned by Lithium’s text analytics within their tool. The scores of these formulas were tied to point totals:
- NPS ([Positive Mentions + Neutral Mentions] – Negative Mentions/Weekly Team Mentions ) – 6 Points
- SIM (NPS*Conversation Share*1,000) – 2 Points
- Conversation Share (Total Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 7 Points
- Positive Conversation Share (Positive Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 7 Points
- Negative Conversation Share (Negative Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 6 Points
*In the case of a tie, the winner is decided by the team with the larger difference between positive and negative mentions.
Before I get into the results for this week, I would like to invite you to test your picks against the formula that I listed above in my ESPN group. The person who finishes the season with the best record will get a $25 Amazon gift card from me.
So without further adieu here are my picks for Week 1 of the NFL season:
New Orleans – 0
Green Bay – 16
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Atlanta – 0
Chicago – 16
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Buffalo – 15
Kansas City – 1
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Cincinnati – 0
Cleveland – 16
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Detroit – 22
Tampa Bay – -6
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Tennessee – 22
Jacksonville – 0
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Indianapolis – 3
Houston – 13
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Philadelphia – 10
St. Louis – 6
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Pittsburgh – 10
Baltimore – 6
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Minnesota – 10
San Diego – 6
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New York Giants – 7
Washington – 9
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Carolina – 6
Arizona – 10
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Seattle – 1
San Francisco – 15
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Dallas – 8
New York Jets – 8* (Tie Breaker)
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New England – 6
Miami – 10
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Oakland – 16
Denver – 0
I know that this method of selecting games is untraditional, but hey it sure beats the pants off picking winners by uniform color or quarterback with nicer hair. I’d love to hear what you think about the methodology and your method of picking as well.
Image – beefy_n1
Very cool experiment – do you like the research tool?
@DevinMathias Thanks, I do love the tool, more than happy answer questions you’d like
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