Auburn Trounces Alabama in Iron Bowl—of GrammarOut of the top-25 college football teams, Alabama fans make the most grammatical errors, while Auburn fans make the fewestBy ANDREW BEATONUpdated Aug. 31, 2015 9:20 p.m. ETThe Iron Bowl of football can be a heart-stopping, seesaw battle to the final series. The Iron Bowl of spelling and grammar is a boring rout.Grammarly, an automated proofreading company, collected 100 comments of at least 50 words from the SB Nation blogs from each team in the Associated Press top-25 college football poll. The result: Alabama fans have the worst grammar, with 6.4 mistakes per 100 words. They can at least take comfort that the team’s rallying cry, “Roll Tide,†was deemed grammatically sound.The comments were reviewed by Grammarly’s algorithm, which can account for hundreds of types of spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors, and verified by editors at the company.More concerning for Alabama may be how well their longtime rivals fared. Auburn fans only made 0.9 mistakes per 100 words, the fewest among the top-25.“Auburn’s fans made seven times fewer mistakes than their in-state rival, Alabama,†Yuriy Timen, Grammarly’s director of marketing, wrote in an email.Surprisingly, there was no correlation between academic rankings of these schools and their fans’ command of the English language. Although Stanford ranked sixth among the top-25 schools in grammar, other highly regarded academic institutions’ fans such as Notre Dame (15th in grammar), UCLA (16th) and Georgia Tech (21st) fared relatively poorly.Ohio State, the reigning national champions and preseason No. 1 team, finished in the middle of the pack at No. 12. But that makes Buckeye fans the wordsmiths of the Big Ten’s elite, finishing well ahead of Michigan State (18th) and Wisconsin (20th). All of the power conferences can make fun of the ACC’s poor grammar skills, as it was the only major conference where all of its ranked teams finished in the bottom half of the grammar rankings.At least college football fans can take solace in the fact that their grammar, even Alabama’s, is better than that of MLB and NFL fans. When Grammarly ran studies on those leagues, fans of the Mets and the Redskins both averaged more than twice as many mistakes per 100 words than Crimson Tide fans.
We are an erudite fanbase.
Who you calling rude, troglodyte?
4 Replies
1412 Views