As part of the Goizeuta Bracket Buzz contest, we were tasked to determine which of the 8 matchups in the Sweet Sixteen would produce the most pre-game “buzz” on Twitter. Essentially, we looked at the 24 hour period before tip-off, and collected all tweets that mentioned either team or the match-up in that period. The Kentucky-Louisville matchup had the most pre-game buzz. The chart below shows the pre-game buzz for all 8 matchups (it has been indexed with Kentucky-Louisville as 100).
Mike Lewis & Manish Tripathi, Emory University, 2014