Politics and Sports BIG 10 and Pac 12 Decisions

If you happen to be a fan of a football team in a conference with a team in California or Illinois, your season is canceled or postponed. The Big Ten and the Pac-12 announced Aug. 11 their decisions to postpone the season. Outside the Power Five conferences, the Mid-American Conference and then the Mountain West Conference, which include 12 teams apiece, canceled their fall sports seasons.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is playing football. Why may you ask? The answer is political. After crawling comments from various news sources and Youtube videos, we found that 64% of users think there are political ties to the decisions made regarding shutting down football.

This data comes from software designed to analyze user comments, posts, videos, and other online expressions. This information is used to gather actual online user sentiment from social media applications. This user sentiment helps our program determine mass online opinions on related topics. 

Here are some examples of what users think about this entire situation: