In a recent post, I asserted that Mike Missanelli’s Twitter feed was 96% politics and 4% sports, which is a ratio approaching Dave Zirin levels. Not even Jemele Hill could pull that off.

We didn’t actually go through Mike’s tweets and do a tally; it was just a passing joke of a comment about how he’s recently been very fired up on Twitter, which resulted in him having to clarify that he was not actually threatening the Vice President of the United States with physical violence. Mike also removed all 97.5 the Fanatic references from his Twitter profile and changed his handle, which he explained was done “in honor of Ben Simmons.”

In a shocking development, the cheeky politics-to-sports ratio assertion has been challenged by a Crossing Broad reader, who wants to know what the real numbers look like. Surely Mike’s Twitter feed is not 96% politics is it?

Well, in the interest of fairness and thorough journalism, we decided to PARSE THE DATA by going through the last three weeks of Mike’s tweets (October 1st through October 21st), and categorizing them as such:

  1. sports
  2. politics or social issues
  3. miscellaneous

 

Here’s what we found after combing through 84 tweets, which includes retweets but does not include replies (since replies are redundant and typically stick with the same topic of the original post):

  • 23 tweets about sports
  • 54 tweets about politics or social issues
  • six miscellaneous tweets

 

When you run the numbers, that’s 64.2% political tweets over the past three weeks, so no, it’s not 96% politics but it’s close to 2/3rds of what he’s talking about on the platform and more than doubles his sports commentary.

The sports tweets are basically comprised of brief in-game Eagles observations, like this:

And then the political/social tweets mostly center on Donald Trump being an idiot, with some thoughts on Black Lives Matter and racism sprinkled in:

If you go back further, the number of political tweets obviously ramp up throughout the summer as the debates and the election began to loom much closer on horizon.

On a serious note, and to get to the real meat of the article, I know people are fired up about November 3rd. These are not normal times, and folks from all backgrounds and all careers are crossing into the political arena to share their thoughts because they think we’re at a crossroads here, that the future of the country hinges on what happens in two weeks. There’s nothing wrong with that. Every American is well within their right to step over the line and take a stand for what they believe in. We’ve seen everybody from Dan Le Batard to Tony Bruno go heavy on politics, with varying results.

But the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people who believe that sports media folks should continue to “stick to sports,” even in a time as divisive and emotionally charged as this one.

Practically speaking, it benefits Mike from a job/career standpoint to try to remain neutral, shelve his beliefs, and not alienate any listeners in the process, because if he continues to go hardcore with anti-Trump takes, conservatives are going to stop listening, if they haven’t already. That might be fine for Mike, who probably doesn’t give a shit that he’s losing listeners he doesn’t want in the first place, but if it results in a ratings dip or bothers Beasley Media or any number of sponsors, then things start to get tricky. The boat begins to rock.

Stick to sports really is a simple concept. Every sports media member, unless restricted by their employer, needs to make an individual decision when it comes to remaining neutral or wading into politics. Is it worth the trouble? Is there a meaningful end result? There’s a risk vs. reward that comes with crossing the sports and politics threshold, so you weigh the positives against the negatives.