2020 Draft

Every year, fans gather at the NFL Draft to share their reactions live as each pick is announced. With the 2020 NFL Draft held virtually due to COVID-19, fans turned to the internet to boo and cheer instead. This dataset includes all Reddit comments during the draft from /r/NFL and each of the team subreddits, as well as sentiment score measuring how happy or angry each fan was.

During the draft, a live RShiny app capturing the emotions of each team's fanbase in realtime was streamed at twitch.tv/caiobrighenti. For full information on the project and the data generation pipeline, visit the project's GitHub repository.

Dataset

The dataset includes three files containing the comments from each of the three nights of the draft. The first file includes comments during the 1st round, the second comments during the 2nd-3rd rounds, and the third comments from the 4th-7th rounds.

The data also contains metadata aside from the content of each comment, including a timestamp, the author's team, and a sentiment score from -1 to 1 calculated using VADER as well as a small set of heuristics.

To facilitate analysis, a fourth data file is included containing timestamps and player/team selections for each pick.

Analysis

This dataset opens the door to so many fascinating questions. I'm greatly excited to see what work people can come up with using this project. Some things I'd like to see include:

• Analysis on the relationship between fan sentiment and draft surplus value
• Deep-dives into specific fanbases throughout the night
• Highlights of the night, identifying most popular and most negative picks
• Application of this dataset as a training set for social media natural language processing problems

If you tackle any of the projects on this list, or do anything else with the dataset, all I ask is that you credit me! Just tweeting about it and tagging me in it is enough. And, that way I get to see it too.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Andrew Beaton at the Wall Street Journal for writing a great article covering the project
• Thanks to Lee Sharpe for providing data files of player selections, as well as team logos used during the draft livestream
• Thanks to Nick Wan for moderating the livestream during the draft
• Thanks to Moo for lots of general RShiny help

I claim no ownership of the comments, all comments comes courtesy of the Reddit API using PRAW.