Spiral16

Kansas State University recently fired Ron Prince after two and a half lackluster seasons as head coach.

The firing of both Prince and Washington’s Ty Willingham leaves only four black coaches in the FBS: Turner Gill of Buffalo, Randy Shannon of Miami, Sylvester Croom of Mississippi State and Kevin Sumlin of Houston.

According to a study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida, this is the lowest number of minority coaches in 15 years.

Nearly 40 percent of this Ecosystem is news organizations.

We used our Spark software to do a quick sampling on the reach of the TIDES report. In a few days, Aaron and I pulled in 224 Nodes (Web sites) mentioning the report or Dr. Richard Lapchick (the report’s co-author).

Just by looking at the Relative Insight Scenario Spread - a graph in Spark that organizes sites into categories - you can tell that TIDES and Dr. Lapchick are newsmakers.

Of the 255 Nodes mentioning the report or TIDES, nearly 40 percent of them are news organizations.

Blogs are the most prominent conversational category, with nearly 17 percent of Nodes. If you add in social networks and bookmarking sites, about 19 percent of the Ecosystem consists of these conversational sites.

Another huge chunk of this graph is the Company/Organization category. These Nodes consist of mostly University of Central Florida and TIDES pages.

The Semantic Cloud shows the most frequently used words in an Ecosystem.

In the Semantic Cloud, we can see the most frequently used words in the entire Ecosystem.

This tool helps us understand the language that people are using to talk about a specific topic.

In this case, there are not many surprises. Words associated with diversity, sports, gender and minorities are part of the list.

Also appearing are the words Obama and president - showing that journalists and creators associate this topic closely with the election of the country’s first black president.

In the Virtualization video, you can see a  small cluster of connections in the center of the 3D map. Those Nodes are mostly pages from the University of Central Florida and TIDES.

Only eight Nodes displayed obvious sentiment about the TIDES report.

These “Company/Organization” sites link to each other, and to a few blogs or Web sites.

Most of the Nodes in this Virtualization are from news organizations.

Surprisingly, there was not an overwhelming amount of sentiment related to this topic. Out of the 224 Nodes surveyed, only eight showed any positive or negative reaction to the study.

That’s 3.5 Percent.

In this Ecosystem, the story comes from the amount of news organizations covering TIDES’ report - not necessarily the amount of connections or links between a few influential Nodes.

The timing of the release (just after the election and Prince’s firing at KSU) made this information newsworthy. If the goal in releasing this report was to get exposure and generate discussion… mission accomplished.

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