Social Scorecard: Oregon, Pac-12, tale of two quarterbacks + the World Series

Welcome back, Pac-12!?

It’s been an eventful past few months for the Pac-12 Conference, starting this summer with the stunning news that USC and UCLA would bolt the conference to join the Big Ten in 2024.

That’s a ways ahead into the future, but the present is looking pretty good for the conference on the football field. USC, UCLA, Oregon, Utah and perhaps Washington are locked in a battle for the conference title. Talk is even picking up over the possibility that a Pac-12 champion might make the College Football Playoff for the first time since 2016, although some pundits also are quick to douse that hope.

Oregon made a big statement Saturday with its 45-30 victory over previously undefeated UCLA in which quarterback Bo Nix passed for five touchdowns to begin receiving mentions for Heisman Trophy consideration.

In this week’s edition of Social Scorecard, my colleague Matthew Barry and I will examine Oregon-UCLA and also take a much closer look at Bo Nix, who transferred from Auburn to Oregon during the offseason. We’ll even take a look at some of his NIL deals.?

We do this by analyzing fan conversational data using the Talkwalker Consumer Intelligence platform. Powerful artificial intelligence analyzes fan conversation across social media, message boards, chat boards, news sites, podcasts and blogs to deliver insight into trends, themes, demographics, sentiment and more.

We’ll wrap things up this week by looking at baseball’s postseason now that the World Series matchup is set between the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies. And yes, if you are of a certain age like me, you still find it weird to see the Astros in the American League. What in the name of Nolan Ryan and JR Richard is this nonsense??

Before we dive in, here are some more Bo Nix highlights:

Duck and cover

Using Talkwalker, we tracked real-time fan conversation and sentiment during their big showdown in Eugene, Oregon, where the graphs track the ebb-and-flow of the game. The first graph shows how Oregon fans dominated the conversation, understandable as they surged into the lead. The second tracks sentiment of the conversation, and you can see the spikes and dips in direct correlation to key points in the action.

3:45 - 4 pm: The Ducks and Bruins trade field goals to start the game off at 3-3

4 - 4:15: Bo Nix connects with Terrance Ferguson to put the Ducks up 10-3

4:15 - 4:30: Keegan Jones took off for an incredible run to tie the game at 10 a piece, however Troy Franklin helped build the lead on a 49 yard reception to put Oregon up 17-10

4:30 - 4:45: Oregon recovers an onside kick and then strikes again with a Jordan James touchdown to go up 24-10

4:45 - 5: UCLA gets back on the board for the first time since the first quarter on a 44 yard FG, 24-13

5 - 5:15: Bo Nix connects with Troy Franklin for the second time in the game, to give the Ducks a 31-13 lead going into halftime

5:30 - 5:45: UCLA gets another FG to bring the score to 31-16

5:45 - 6: Oregon keeps their offense moving as Cam McCormick extends the lead to 38-16

6 - 6:15: Zach Charbon finds the end zone for the Bruins to bring the score to 38-23

6:15 - 6:30: Bo Nix gets TD pass #5 as he connects with Bucky Irving to bring the score to 45-23

6:30 - 6:45: Bryan Addison gets his first interception of the season to slam the door on the UCLA offense

6:45 - 7: Jake Bobo scores a late TD to bring the score within 15 points, but it’s too late as Oregon pulls off the win 45-30

Trading places

One of the interesting coincidences in this college football season is the fact that Oregon and Auburn have swapped quarterbacks thanks to the transfer portal.

Nix got off to a rough start at Oregon when the Ducks were demolished by defending national champion Georgia 49-3 in the season opener. That may come back to bite the Ducks and the Pac-12 in the CFP race, but Nix and Oregon have bounced back impressively. He has steadily become one of the top stars on the West Coast, peaking with Saturday’s showcase performance.

Meanwhile, Robby Ashford didn’t begin the season as Auburn’s starter but has since claimed the starting role in what has been a chaotic and challenging season for the Tigers. We tracked sentiment around both quarterbacks over the past 30 days.

As you can, see 30 percent of conversation about Nix was classified as positive by Talkwalker’s artificial intelligence that explores language both for meaning and context at an accuracy rate of more than 90 percent. For Ashford, it’s 24 percent positive. Both of those are relatively good positive sentiments for an athlete. More noticeable is that both have negative sentiments of less than 10 percent. Considering the regular negative comments typically present for fans from opposing teams, that’s also pretty good.

What themes emerge in conversation around these two signal-callers?

First, we segmented out themes from comments about Ashford made by self-identified Auburn fans/alumni in the past 30 days. As you can see, it’s a mix of positive (green), neutral (yellow) and negative (red).?

Now let’s look at Nix, who started three seasons at Auburn, passing for more than 7,000 yards with the Tigers. The team, however, didn’t meet expectations and the coach who recruited him, Gus Malzahn, was fired. After one season under Bryan Harsin, Nix bolted for Oregon and hasn’t looked back. That doesn’t mean, however, that fans haven’t.

We checked the sentiment of conversation by self-identified fans/alumni of both schools over the past 30 days. You can see that Oregon fans have completely embraced the Alabamian, but Auburn fans still hold some positive sentiment for him, too.

Now let’s look at themes that emerge from Auburn fans/alumni. We are able to segment out conversations by people who have included identifiers in their social bios. Think phrases such as "Auburn fan" or hashtags such as #WarEagle. We notice phrases such as “huge improvement” are prominent as well as phrases such as “huge day” and “sick hype.” The most discussed theme was about Nix being a dark horse candidate for the Heisman Trophy.

There is definitely a what-might-have-been feel to Auburn fans’ conversation, especially now that Nix is playing very well at Oregon (something he addressed after the big performance against Oregon, where his 5 TD passes matched the season total of Auburn quarterbacks).??

Now let’s look at self-described Oregon fans/alumni. Here the themes are much more performance-focused with phrases such as “absolute beauty” describing a touchdown pass or “tight window” describing Nix’ accuracy. Other themes such as “fantastic throw,” and “perfect game” are frequent. It is safe to say Oregon fans are quite happy with the results of the QB swap.

We also examined where these conversations were taking place. Here is a map from Saturday, with Oregon fan conversations in green and Auburn fan conversations in Orange.? On a day when his former team, Auburn, didn’t play. Tigers fans could tune in to Oregon’s game to see how their former QB would fare. Nix was definitely a topic of conversation in the South.

Bo Nix’s NIL opportunities

Nix was one of the first SEC stars to cash in on name, image & likeness opportunities when they began legal for NCAA athletes to pursue in July 2021. We were able to surface conversations about some of his NIL deals, notably high-profile activations he did with Milos, Subway, Bojangles and Candy Digital. Most of the activity and conversation happened while he was at Auburn. Some of those deals have continued at Oregon.

We don’t know exactly how many deals he carries with the Ducks – we only found these publicly – but it is probably fair to say the opportunities were more visible, plentiful and more lucrative in the football-crazy state of Alabama. However, if he continues this recent outstanding play, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see more brand partnerships in his future.

Bring on the World Series

An eighth-inning home run sent the Philadelphia Phillies to a 4-3 win over the San Diego Padres in a clinching Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. Check out how the post of the highlight to the Phillies’ official Twitter account was shared around the world.

In the American League, the Houston Astros swept the New York Yankees to reach their fourth World Series in six years.?

It sets up what statistically is the biggest Series mismatch, record-wise, since 1906. The Astros won 106 games, best in the American League, while the Phillies were the last team to qualify for the playoffs after finishing 87-75, third place in the NL East.

The Astros clearly are the heavy favorites here, but which fan base is most fired up to be here? We examined fan conversation from Oct. 23-24. Perhaps it is because of this underdog run, but among commenters who self-identified as fans of one of the teams, Phillies fans’ demonstrated the most positive sentiment.

But wait, your team is going to the World Series. Why is there any negativity? In Talkwalker, we can actually explore that deeper by clicking into the conversations and themes. In this case, the majority of the negative sentiments are not directly related to team performance. Examples might be fan complaints about broadcast or media commentary, or complaints about merchandising. For teams looking to better connect with or serve fans, this type of data can provide actionable insights that improve fan experience, help to better position content or even identify potential problems before they grow in stature. Or, it just might let you know that fans of a team were irritated with a talking head that got under their skin and they wanted to let that person know it after they were proven wrong. The point is you can see these trends in real time and determine whether they are simply noise or something to take action upon.

We also saw, overall, more discussion about the Phillies by Phillies fans than about the Astros by Astros fans. That probably makes sense, too. This is familiar territory for the Astros while the Phillies are in the playoffs for the first time since 2011 and in the Series for the first time since 2009.

Here we could see the most influential commentators driving conversation about the Phillies.

And here are those driving the most conversation about the Astros.

We segmented this fan conversation by geography to discover that across the nation, there seemed to be more Phillies fans online. I guess when you didn’t expect to be there, that bandwagon gets crowded – and loud and proud. We’ll see what this looks like after a couple of games.

If you like this kind of content, please consider subscribing to our Social Scorecard newsletter. And if you'd like to learn more about how Talkwalker can be utilized to gain real-time conversational insights that lead to action and impact for your program, contact Tim Stephens at [email protected].