Recent bad aggregation included a lot from NFL training camps. Recent bad aggregation included a lot from NFL training camps.
NFLTwitterBy Andrew Bucholtz on

A hot sports media topic recently has been aggregation. It’s quite possible to relay another source’s report accurately and with appropriate credit, but that’s not how this always goes. We’ve recently noticed major upticks in the amount of complaints about aggregation, and some of that also has to do with the numbers of social media accounts specifically focused on aggregation (and perhaps with X/Twitter changes that pay accounts with X Premium subscriptions for the engagement they receive).

With that in mind, it’s worth taking a look at when aggregation sometimes goes wrong. To do so, we’re bringing back the format of our previous This Week In Hot Takes column, which ran here from August 2016–September 2019, with a plan of discussing some examples of bad aggregation each week. The specific number of examples each week may change, but expect to see regular discussion of where aggregation goes wrong, along with standings for bad aggregators and unfortunate recipients of that aggregation. (This first column’s going to go a little further back than a week to show off some examples of what we’re discussing here, but the idea’s to make this week-by-week going forward.) Each misstep will be rated out of five. User submissions are always welcome via e-mail or Twitter.

August is a perfect time to start this column, as one regular subject for particularly poor aggregation is NFL training camps and the preseason. The NFL aggregation world is perhaps the largest out there, not surprising considering the league’s popularity. There also are a huge number of media members actually covering camps and preseason games and often tweeting observations in real time, and those observations sometimes only get full context in follow-up tweets, articles, or other forms of media. And that all sets up the potential for aggregation to go wrong, as shown in several of the posts below.

5. JPA Football on Clarence Hill’s CeeDee Lamb report:

This one actually accurately relays the substance of Hill’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram report on Lamb’s contract extension discussions, which includes “There is no doubt that a deal will get done. But a contract extension is not close to being completed.” But the issue here is that there’s no link to the story, or even to Hill’s specific tweet of it:

That shows off one of the reasons many get irked about aggregation: Hill’s initial tweet with that story had 20 retweets and 61 likes nine days later, while the JPA Football tweet had 137 retweets and more than 2,400 likes. And there was no value added, other than generic photos of Lamb and the Cowboys’ logo.

Yes, there are people who like aggregator accounts for getting news from beat writers like Hill all around the league, and that’s understandable. But those accounts can do a better job. And more specific citation is always helpful on a couple of fronts; for one, just an account tag makes it difficult for readers to find the initial report and compare it, and for two, a link to a tweet (or directly to a story) is a fairer way to give credit. This report didn’t get any of the details of Hill’s report wrong, which is why it’s relatively low here, but the citation was far from good. This kind of citation is often done by many aggregators, not just JPA Football, but the one here stands out for a specific detailed story that easily could have been linked and was not.

Rating: **

4. “Dov Kleiman” on Bo Nix stats

Speaking of aggregation where the primary problem is credit, that was very obvious with “Dov Kleiman” (seemingly not the actual Dov Kleiman anymore) taking Ryan Michael’s relaying of Bo Nix preseason game stats word-for-word and just adding a linkless H/T and a “The Broncos have their QB1” line in place of Michael’s “Couldn’t ask for a much better delivery.” “Kleiman” later deleted this after Benjamin Allbright called this one out:

An interesting thing here is that none of the information in Michael’s tweet was specific to him, beyond the “Couldn’t ask for a much better delivery” take “Kleiman” removed. Those stats are all publicly available on the NFL’s site. And if the “Kleiman” account had simply put them in a different order, it might have looked like their own tabulation. But a very obvious copy-and-paste like this was a bad look.

Rating: ***

3. BR_Betting on college football season

This is the one non-NFL example this time around, and it’s a similar problem as “Kleiman” on Nix stats. It’s taking information that’s available to anyone, but repurposing it in a way that minimizes the credit for the original compiler. This time, that came from Bleacher Report’s B/R Betting account, taking a college football season factoid from CBS’ Tom Fornelli. And while they did provide credit via a screenshot and a H/T, that’s a bizarre way to do this versus just retweeting.

Rating: ***

2. MLFootball’s “NBC reports” for Aiyuk/Washington discussion

The saga of where Brandon Aiyuk will play this season has already taken a lot of media twists, including with @PrettyRickey213’s battles with insiders. As of Friday, it’s still uncertain if Aiyuk will remain with the San Francisco 49ers or be traded, and that’s led to a lot of games of telephone about different reports. But a particularly bad one came from @_MLFootball Thursday:

A generic “NBC reports” with no link is bad enough in its own right; that could mean anything from a national NBC report to a local one. But this gets worse in that the thing in question does not appear to originate from NBC at all. The “back in play” conversation about Aiyuk and Washington appears to originate from Mike Silver of The San Francisco Chronicle‘s comments in a radio interview with Bay Area sports station KNBR:

How did that turn into “NBC”? Well, Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk (which NBC licenses from him and includes as part of NBC Sports’ digital presence; Florio also appears on their broadcast and streaming platforms) wrote that up, with appropriate credit to both Silver and KNBR. But that led to wild misstatements of who was reporting this, like the @_MLFootball one. (For this, we’ll give subject credit to both Florio and Silver, as both got terribly aggregated here.)

1. “Dov Kleiman” and SportsKeeda Pro Football on Kevin O’Connell/Jim Schwartz discussion

Maybe the worst example of aggregation recently also came from “Kleiman,” as well as SportsKeeda, and it showed off a particular problem with training camp reports. Camps usually involve reporters observing practice and tweeting observations, then getting context from those involved later. Some of those observations are guesses at what’s going on that get refined with further data. But, when only the first guess gets spread and not the clarification, that causes problems.

@TheKardiac_Kid noted an example of this with both “Kleiman” and the SportsKeeda Pro Football account aggregating a tweet from Mark Craig of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune on his speculation on a conversation between head coach Kevin O’Connell and defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz after an injury. Craig later deleted that tweet, and put out a second tweet that he had misunderstood what the conversation was.

Unlike the Nix tweet above, “Kleiman” hasn’t deleted this, and that tweet had more than 715,000 views, nearly 300 retweets, and more than 4,100 likes as of Friday. The SportsKeeda Pro Football account also kept their tweet up, but it only received a few interactions on Twitter; it’s also still up on Facebook (the source of the screenshot above), though, where it got more than 7,500 reactions. So that’s a lot of people who saw a report that “O’Connell went to Schwartz and told him to tone down the physicality,” despite the source of that report saying he interpreted that conversation wrong (at least as per O’Connell’s subsequent comments) and deleting the report. So this stands out as an example of particularly-bungled aggregation.

Rating: *****

Aggregator standings: 

@NFL_DovKleiman: 8
@SKProFootball: 5
@_MLFootball: 5
@BR_Betting: 3
@jasrifootball: 2

Aggregation subject standings: 

Mark Craig: 5
Mike Florio: 5
Mike Silver: 5
Ryan Michael: 3
Tom Fornelli: 3
Clarence Hill: 2

Thanks for reading This Week In Bad Aggregation. Feedback notes and user submissions are always welcomed via e-mail or Twitter.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz