The Cowboys and Steelers Have the NFL’s Most Emotional fans. Where does your team rank?

Football fever is ramping up as the teams going to Super Bowl LIII have now been determined.

Throughout the (post-) season, we’ve been diving into the various affinities, allegiances, habits, hobbies, beliefs, personalities, and demographics found among the individuals making up each NFL team’s fan base.

If You’re New Here

If you’ve already checked out our entry on the NFL’s friendliest fans , this next part may be redundant for you (but welcome back!).

If you’re wondering HOW we can measure an audience’s personality traits, such as friendliness or emotionality , allow us to explain.

Thanks to StatSocial ’s partnership with IBM Watson™ and the integration of their Personality Insights™ service into our reporting, we can not only break down an audience by affinities and demographics, but also by personality traits. How does Watson do that, you ask?

IBM Watson Personality Insights ™ allows StatSocial to understand the personality types, traits, intrinsic needs, and values of individuals based on the way people write — i.e. the different types of language people choose to express themselves. Analyzing the language used — and a number of other factors including frequency of communication, interaction with others, etc. (you can read much more at the IBM blog entry here ) — IBM Watson can score personality traits across a number of interesting dimensions.

StatSocial applies this insight to all of our analyses.

Whatever team you are rooting for, you’d probably like to get to the topic at hand. Here you go.

“It’s just emotion that’s taken me over”

While a presumption of impartiality should be made when reading the insights shared in every entry of the StatSocial blog — “ statistics ” basically being right there in our name, and all — you should especially infer no reporting of virtue and/or faults here.

Emotions are complicated things, but they’re not inherently bad. Didn’t you see Pixar ’s ‘ Inside Ou t’?

The team whose fans we found to be the friendliest in the NFL are also the most emotional. Even feelings are big in Texas, it seems.

The once heated rivalry between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cowboys is brought to mind by this list’s upper reaches. Three times the two NFL teams with the most emotional fans faced off in the Super Bowl , and only once did the Cowboys emerge victorious. So many feels.

The most emotional and least emotional fan bases showed up to home games this past season, with the teams on either end of the list having more or less sold out every game. Clearly, this is not a measure of dedication.

To further illustrate: Watch as our company’s CEO — a one time Maine native, and accordingly a Patriots fanatic — displays his dedication with only the coolest of heads.

(If you have “Do Not Track” enabled on your browser, you can see the below by clicking-through here. )

( Edited to Add, 2/4/2019: On the evening of February 1, 2019, Michael Hussey — StatSocial ’s CEO — again attempted the above feat, and again emerged victorious. The difference? This year his gutsy bacchanal inspired his beloved Patriots to victory. )

A moving tribute, no doubt. The outcome of the game in question is of no consequence here, it’s the combination of dedication and stoicism to which we draw attention.

As of this writing, the Patriots emerged from Sunday’s AFC Championship Game victorious. While in the 48.9th percentile for emotionality (so, a bit below average), in the grand scheme of the 32 NFL fan bases, Pats fans are the 9th most emotional.

It remains to be known whether our CEO will be attempting his show of dedication once more, or if perhaps this year he has something else planned. Whatever the case may be, do not let his levelheaded demeanor deceive you. He cares to a degree that can not adequately be measured in Filet-O-Fish ( Filet-o-Fishes ?).

Bookmark This Page

We’ll be visiting numerous subjects of this general nature — all highlighting the rich and varied affinities of each NFL team’s fans — in the days running up to Super Bowl LIII.

And check out the written matter in the footer, and reach out to us if you have any questions or would like to see much, much more.

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