Notre Dame Basketball: Twitter-Based Power Rankings

How do the Notre Dame basketball players rank on Twitter?

It’s no secret to anyone who follows college basketball that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish have struggled so far this season to compensate for the losses of Jerian Grant and Pat Connaughton to the NBA. Coach Mike Brey’s squad is 10-5 overall, showing signs of another strong year offensively but lacking defensive toughness and the ability to finish in close games.

So, as a devout fan, I’ve been searching for supplemental ways to enjoy my favorite college basketball team, considering their play hasn’t quite been cutting it. So, naturally, as someone who absolutely loves Twitter and appreciates a strong Twitter presence from many of the people I follow on that glorious website, I began to look up the Twitter accounts of the team’s players, hoping to find some real gems to instill some newfound optimism for the duration of the season.

I wanted to rank the players based on their presence on Twitter, but not necessarily on just their accounts themselves.

Nay, that would not do.

A few of the players do not appear to have Twitter profiles at all, and only judging a player on their tweets would be a disservice to the other tweets in the Twittersphere that help provide fascinating insights into their lives, anyway.

So, I set out to rank the players based on their personal Twitter brand (pTb), which is probably not a new concept but I like to think I at least just made up a new acronym for it. A person’s pTb is loosely defined, in my mind, as the aura, reputation, and vibe that surrounds each player, has been established for each player, and is given off by each player, respectively, on Twitter.com.

So, I looked at all of the players’ tweets, tweets they’ve retweeted, and many tweets from the official Notre Dame Men’s Basketball Twitter account, and compiled my findings into one document.

From that document, I ranked all 14 Notre Dame men’s basketball players based on those findings.

So, please click through these slides to learn some incredible fun facts about these young men, including nuggets of information like who gave themselves the best nickname of all time, who dresses well, who is afraid of movies with haunted dolls, who resembles one of Spongebob Squarepants’ arch-nemeses, who looks good in a tennis skirt or mutton chops, and who has gone from “homeless” to clutch in just the course of a year.

All of this is thanks to these players’ presence on Twitter. I consider myself #blessed for being able to study it.

As we head into the rankings, let us reflect on the icon of a man who leads this group of Twitter stars, Head Coach Mike Brey, and his team spaghetti dinners:

Here we go!

Next: Number 14