Washington Redskins: Bad at Football, Worse at SpellingStudy shows that Redskins fans get a failing grade for grammar, while Lions fans are best Geoff Foster The Wall Street JournalThe Washington Redskins have won seven games in two years. Quarterback Robert Griffin III, once destined to be the franchise savior, has struggled with injuries and poor play. As the losses pile up, it’s safe to assume the team’s fans are increasingly growing detached and dejected. Things have gotten so bad in the Beltway that Redskins fans have even given up on proper grammar and spelling. Grammarly, an automated proofreading company, can use algorithms to check writing for more than 400 types of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. Armed with this, the Count did the one thing that made the most sense: Make Grammarly rank each NFL fan base on its writing skills. To do so, they reviewed 150 reader comments that were at least 50 words long from the news section of each NFL team website (12,728 total words, on average, per team). The Redskins finished dead last with 16.5 mistakes per 100 words—roughly 30% worse than New Orleans Saints fans, the NFL’s second most typo-prone fan base. 
[click to enlarge]It should be noted that there was no real correlation between losing and grammar/spelling errors, as the New England Patriots fans were the fourth worst in Grammarly’s sample. Top English honors went to the Detroit Lions, who averaged just 4.2 mistakes per 100 words. Lions fans were also tied with Browns fans for fewest spelling mistakes. It’s possible this is just a byproduct of having to use the word “Ndamukong” less often. That burden is now on Miami Dolphins fans. NFL fans in general aren’t great when it comes to clean copy. An earlier Grammarly study that looked across the entire league found that NFL fans make 9.9 mistakes per 100 words, on average. That is more than MLB and NHL fans (each 8.2) but fewer than fans of the NBA (10.3) and Nascar (10.5).The most surprising finding, though, was the winner of “Most Verbose NFL Fan Base.” Fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars wrote the most on their team’s website with an average of 103 words per comment. What Jaguars fans could possibly be talking about at such length will forever remain a mystery.link
