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The NFL’s Most (and Least) Optimistic Fan Bases

Facebook aggregated the posts and comments of its 49 million users who like an official NFL team page to see which fans were

By ANDREW BEATON
Sept. 10, 2015 12:00 a.m. ET

There are lots of reasons to be happy in San Diego. The city has tropical weather, a beautiful coastline and a state-of-the-art zoo. And the city’s football team, the Chargers, have only had one sub-.500 season in the last 11 years. Despite all of this, it has the least optimistic football fans in the country.

During NFL training camps and preseason (July 22 to Sept. 7), Facebook aggregated the posts and comments of its 49 million users who like an official team page. For the first time, they measured those fans’ sentiments and classified them based on how positive or negative they were for their given team. The result: Chargers’ fans are the least optimistic in the NFL.

“Facebook is the largest community of sports fans in the world,” said Dan Reed, Facebook’s head of global sports partnerships. “You can measure sentiment with a large degree of accuracy.”

While the Chargers seem relatively innocuous in the NFL news cycle, there have been plenty of reasons for San Diego fans to be pessimistic: Rumors have been swirling about the team moving to Los Angeles, while quarterback Philip Rivers’s future with the franchise was in doubt until a recent contract extension.

New England Patriots’ fans rated as the second-least optimistic after San Diego’s, but the study included a large period when it looked like quarterback Tom Brady would be suspended for his alleged role in the Deflategate scandal. Some of the other least optimistic teams are more obvious—such as the Jets and Redskins. Even Bills fans are relatively pessimistic, despite the hiring of the perennially optimistic and Super Bowl-promising Rex Ryan as coach.

The most optimistic fan bases usually had up-and-coming quarterbacks to rally around like in Miami (Ryan Tannehill), Minnesota (Teddy Bridgewater) and Tennessee (Marcus Mariota).

But what about the Chiefs, whose fans topped the list of optimism? They were the only undefeated team in the preseason.

The Pat's I kind of get because DeflateGate was in full swing. They may have bumped up after the appeal and overturning of Brady's 4 game suspension. Now it might go down as they might just suspend the whole lot of them lol
Charaiders and Rams are understandable. Still they polled the fans after the draft, during TC and meaningless pre's.
It is also a Facebook poll which might not be a NFL savy bunch. Can't speak to that though.

I wonder if high expectations lead to pessimism, i mean if the Patriots don't win the SB, they've failed...

Looks like a graph of completely random information to me. Unless the optimism concerning the Rams is about all the fans anticipating their return to LA.

Elvis wrote:I wonder if high expectations lead to pessimism, i mean if the Patriots don't win the SB, they've failed...

Years of losing has made me pessimistic.

moklerman wrote:Looks like a graph of completely random information to me. Unless the optimism concerning the Rams is about all the fans anticipating their return to LA.

Based on preseason attendance I woulda thought Rams fans would be the most pessimistic. But maybe there was enough LA fans to offset that.