NFL fans have strong opinions about the players on the field. Some are adored…others not so much.
To see which players draw the most praise and the most criticism, Canada Sports Betting analyzed a year of Reddit discussion across every NFL team subreddit, tracking how often each player is mentioned and whether the conversation around them skews positive or negative.
The result is a league-wide ranking of the NFL’s most loved and most hated players. Love and hate are measured separately, so the same player can rank highly on both. Frequently the biggest names do, with their own teams adoring their star and opposing fans strongly disagreeing.
How the rankings work: Players are ranked from No. 1 downward by Love Score and Hate Score. Scores are normalised on a 0–10 scale for readability, where 10.0 represents the strongest positive or negative fan reaction in the dataset.
Key Findings
- Patrick Mahomes: NFL’s most loved player (Love Score: 10.0), leading the league in discussion volume with 11,031 comments (63.6% positive). He also ranks No. 3 on the hate list.
- Daniel Jones: Most criticized player league-wide, holding a Hate Score of 10.0 with 31.0% negative comments. He represents the mirror image of a franchise favorite, ranking No. 69 for love in contrast to his No. 1 hate ranking.
- Jake Moody: The league’s least loved qualifying player, ranking dead last for love (155 out of 155) and No. 2 for hate—the most lopsided negative ratio in the NFL.
- Love vs. Hate Overlap: High visibility drives both praise and criticism; polarizing star QBs dominate both lists, including Patrick Mahomes (No. 1 Love / No. 3 Hate), Jalen Hurts (No. 2 Love / No. 4 Hate), and Joe Burrow (No. 5 Love / No. 7 Hate).
- Quarterback Dominance: Quarterbacks draw the majority of league focus, occupying 8 of the top 10 spots on the most-loved list and 6 of the top 10 on the most-hated list.
- Love Score: (Positive Mentions / Total Mentions) × log(Total Mentions)
- Hate Score: (Negative Mentions / Total Mentions) × log(Total Mentions)
- Reddit: NFL and team-specific subreddits (fan comments analysed for sentiment)
- Pro Football Reference: player name reference list
- VADER Sentiment Analysis: social-media sentiment scoring framework
- Full dataset: complete rankings of all analyzed NFL players
The Most Loved NFL Players
These players generate the strongest positive fan sentiment across Reddit, weighted by how often they’re discussed. Higher Love Scores reflect sustained approval, not isolated praise.
| Rank | Player | Team | Love Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patrick Mahomes | Kansas City Chiefs | 10.00 |
| 2 | Jalen Hurts | Philadelphia Eagles | 9.10 |
| 3 | Sam Darnold | Seattle Seahawks | 9.10 |
| 4 | Matthew Stafford | Los Angeles Rams | 8.41 |
| 5 | Joe Burrow | Cincinnati Bengals | 8.27 |
| 6 | Jaxson Dart | New York Giants | 8.10 |
| 7 | Brock Purdy | San Francisco 49ers | 7.25 |
| 8 | Francisco Mauigoa | New York Giants | 7.22 |
| 9 | J.J. McCarthy | Minnesota Vikings | 7.17 |
| 10 | Jared Verse | Cleveland Browns | 7.16 |
What stands out
A clear No. 1, then a tight pack. Mahomes (10.0) sits almost a full point clear of the field. From Jalen Hurts at No. 2 (9.10) through Jared Verse at No. 10 (7.16), the rest of the top 10 is separated by less than two points- broad approval rather than a runaway second favourite.
The reigning MVP is rewarded. Matthew Stafford lands at No. 4 with a 64.9% positive share across 5,141 comments, the kind of number that follows an MVP season rather than predicting one.
Praise survives volume. Mahomes, Hurts (8,967 comments) and Joe Burrow (6,836) all stay near the top despite enormous discussion volume. That’s the harder trick: sentiment usually regresses as sample size grows.
Young players overperform. Jaxson Dart (No. 6), J.J. McCarthy (No. 9) and Jared Verse (No. 10) all crack the top 10. Young players get graded on ceiling; veterans get graded on results.
Editor’s Note: bet365 has the Chiefs, led by much loved and much hated Mahomes, at +1600 to win the Super Bowl. Check out this bet365 review to learn more.
The Most Hated NFL Players
These players generate the strongest negative fan sentiment across Reddit, weighted by how often they’re discussed. Higher Hate Scores reflect sustained criticism, not one-off backlash.
| Rank | Player | Team | Hate Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Daniel Jones | Indianapolis Colts | 10.00 |
| 2 | Jake Moody | Washington Commanders | 9.17 |
| 3 | Patrick Mahomes | Kansas City Chiefs | 8.97 |
| 4 | Jalen Hurts | Philadelphia Eagles | 8.92 |
| 5 | James Lynch | Chicago Bears | 8.78 |
| 6 | Christian Kirk | San Francisco 49ers | 8.77 |
| 7 | Joe Burrow | Cincinnati Bengals | 8.39 |
| 8 | Trey Hendrickson | Baltimore Ravens | 8.38 |
| 9 | Zach Wilson | New Orleans Saints | 8.27 |
| 10 | Mason Rudolph | Pittsburgh Steelers | 8.25 |
What stands out
Jones leads, and it isn’t close on rate. Daniel Jones combines heavy volume (2,811 comments) with a 31.0% negative share. No other player above 2,000 comments is close to that rate.
A kicker is the exception at the top. Jake Moody (No. 2) is the only non-quarterback in the top four, at 32.1% negative- the highest negative rate of any player in the dataset. When a specialist gets discussed at volume, something usually went wrong.
Elite quarterbacks still absorb heat. Mahomes (No. 3), Hurts (No. 4) and Burrow (No. 7) all appear here. Rivalry subreddits treat a superstar as a target, and that traffic is indistinguishable from criticism to a sentiment model.
The NFL’s Most Polarizing Players
Some players rank highly on both lists, drawing strong support and sharp criticism at the same time. These are the players fans argue about most.
Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City Chiefs): Love: No. 1 · Hate: No. 3 The most praised and near-most criticised player in the league. Three championships and eight seasons of saturation coverage produce both at once.
Jalen Hurts (Philadelphia Eagles): Love: No. 2 · Hate: No. 4 Nearly 9,000 comments and a near-identical position on both lists — the signature of a franchise quarterback under permanent spotlight.
Joe Burrow (Cincinnati Bengals): Love: No. 5 · Hate: No. 7 Expectation is the mechanism. When a team is built around one player, every result gets attributed to him.
Jaxson Dart (New York Giants): Love: No. 6 · Hate: No. 11 Dart posts an identical 8.10 on both indexes, the most evenly split player in the entire dataset, and the only rookie-contract quarterback in the top 15 of both lists.
Daniel Jones (Indianapolis Colts): Love: No. 69 · Hate: No. 1 The exception that proves the rule. Jones is the rare high-volume player whose conversation is genuinely lopsided rather than merely loud.
Bonus: Who Gets Insulted Most?
Sentiment scoring measures tone. A separate signal, whether a comment contains outright profanity or a personal insult, measures something blunter. Ranked by the share of a player’s comments containing an insult (minimum 800 comments):
| Rank | Player | Insult Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jacoby Brissett (Cardinals) | 37.4% |
| 2 | Spencer Rattler (Saints) | 36.3% |
| 3 | Gardner Minshew II (Cardinals) | 33.9% |
| 4 | Joe Flacco (Bengals) | 32.9% |
| 5 | Daniel Jones (Colts) | 31.7% |
Every name in the top five is a quarterback, and four of the five have started for multiple teams. Journeyman quarterbacks absorb a specific kind of abuse that neither the love nor the hate list fully captures.
NFL fan sentiment isn’t driven by agreement, it’s driven by attention. The players who dominate the conversation aren’t always the most liked or the most criticised, but the ones who reliably provoke a reaction.
In that sense, love and hate aren’t opposites. They’re two sides of the same spotlight.
Methodology
Canada Sports Betting analysed Reddit discussion to measure how fans talk about NFL players, positively and negatively.
Data collection. Comments were collected from the subreddit of each NFL team over a twelve-month period. Target subreddits were defined by a curated seed list mapping each subreddit to a team and team type; only NFL-type subreddits were kept. A reference list of 2,363 player names was scraped from Pro Football Reference to serve as the matching dictionary.
Data preparation. Comments and player names were cleaned with the same function: lowercased, with URLs, @-mentions, hashes and punctuation removed, and whitespace collapsed. Emoji were kept, since VADER uses them for sentiment. Applying identical cleaning to names ensures forms like “Ja’Marr Chase” still match once punctuation is stripped.
Sentiment. Each comment was scored with VADER (Hutto & Gilbert, 2014), a rule-based model tuned for social media, giving a compound score from −1 to +1. Standard thresholds labelled comments positive (≥ 0.05), negative (≤ −0.05) or neutral.
Insults. A comment was flagged if it contained any term from a curated lexicon of profanity and insults.
Player attribution. Each player was matched by full name, plus their bare last name only when it was distinctive (four or more characters, not a common English word, and unique to one player). Matching used a word-boundary regex, longest term first. Comments naming multiple players were duplicated so that each (comment, player) pair was its own record, carrying that comment’s sentiment and insult flag.
Scoring. Records were grouped by player to count negative, positive, neutral and insulting comments and average polarity. Players with fewer than 800 comments were dropped, leaving 155 players in the ranked pool. The threshold is deliberately high: a 20-comment floor lets a player with a handful of angry mentions outrank a franchise quarterback, which measures sample noise rather than fan sentiment. Two indexes were then calculated:
Raw scores were normalised to a 0–10 scale using min–max normalisation across the 155 qualifying players. Scores are designed for comparison and ranking, with 10.0 representing the strongest reaction observed.
Exclusions. Twenty-one players were removed from the rankings because their surname is a common English word or an NFL city name, which inflated their mention counts with comments that were not about them. This affected, among others, players surnamed Still, Likely, Board, Weeks, Hand, Blue, Land, Minor, Duck, Page, Marks, Heck, Settle, Moon, Loop, Lock, Dallas, Tampa and Houston. One surname, Anger, additionally biased the sentiment score itself.
