Fans of the Memphis Grizzlies can exult, after ranking first in a new national study. And there's a good chance they'll spell "exult" correctly: The team's fans were found to make the fewest grammatical mistakes in a review of comments about three of America's major sports.
NBA fans made the fewest mistakes, with NFL fans making the most. And while MLB fans were in the middle, a poor showing by the Philadelphia Phillies' followers was blamed for the city's fall
from fifth to 24th place in the rankings of 42 cities with major sports teams.
The 2015 Grammar Power Rankings come from Grammarly, the auto-correcting app, which collected and reviewed 100 comments from the teams' official websites, as well as sports sites such as SBNation. The survey does not include the NHL or MLS.
Among cities, the rankings give No. 1 Memphis a particular reason to brag over No. 42 Nashville, whose fans were judged to be the least reliable users of the English language. While Memphis fans made only an average of 2.47 mistakes for every 100 words they wrote, their Nashvillian peers committed more than 11 errors.
Among individual teams, the most errors came from fans of the Washington Redskins, whose rate of 16.5 mistakes per 100 words was unrivaled. No other team surpassed 14 mistakes per 100 words in Grammarly's review.
But perhaps that proclivity for errors is catching: Instead of calling Washington's baseball team by its correct name, the Nationals, Grammarly wrote the name as "Nations" in an early news release about the study.