– Is student-athlete an oxymoron for Southeastern Conference Grads? –

A just released survey undertaken by Grammarly, a writing app that corrects spelling and grammar mistakes, ranked the Super Bowl teams’ best and worst grammarians.

As it turns out, Trai Turner, a guard with the Carolina Panthers and Malik Jackson, a defensive end with the Denver Broncos, finished dead last on the list. Ironically, both are graduates of Southeastern Conference schools (Turner attended L.S.U. and Jackson is a graduate of the University of Tennessee). It makes one wonder if SEC universities are more interested in producing athletes or students.

The Grammerly rankings represent an average based on 60 to 100 Tweets from each player’s personal Twitter account. They then identified errors in the players’ tweets such as misspellings, mixed-up homonyms (i.e. your vs you’re) and subject-verb disagreement.

In addition to the woeful writing skills of the two aforementioned SEC grads, there were quite a few other interesting tidbits worth sharing:

– The Panthers’ players are more literate, having edged out their rivals by a margin of two mistakes.
– Special teams’ players have the best grammar overall.
– Offensive players proved to be the most offensive when it came to roughing up the English language.
– Panthers’ fans bested their opposite number with an average 6.6 spelling, grammar and punctuation score while the Denver fans made 7.5 mistakes.

Bottom line: If you’re handicapping the Super Bowl, and wish to factor intelligence into the equation, I’d go with Carolina. That said, one would also have to investigate which team has the most SEC graduates on its roster. That seems to be a real show stopper when it comes to literacy.