While New Zealand will savour its second straight title, the 2015 Rugby World Cup might be one that USA Rugby wants to forget: the Eagles were outscored at the tournament by 106 points, en route to losing all four matches.
Sad side note: only Uruguay scored fewer points than the States.
But despite the less-than-sterling performance on the pitch, USA Rugby can at least be proud of how it was represented on social media. Between the start of the tournament on September 18 and the Eagles’ final match on October 11, #USARugby was mentioned in around 1,950 tweets, for an average of 81 each day of the tourney.
Peak mentions for the organization came, unsurprisingly, on game days, with the team’s first match ━ against Samoa on September 20 ━ producing 548 tweets alone. At that point, hopes were high:
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Better believe I’ll be up at 7am to watch the eagles play #USA #RWC2015
— Geraldude (@justgeraldude) September 20, 2015
GO AMERICA! #RugbyWorldCup #USARugby #USA — Cquidnee (@CydneeBrook) September 20, 2015
But as the tournament progressed and the chances of advancing grew slimmer, game day tweets became less frequent, dropping in number every game: from a peak of 548 the first game, to 422 against Scotland (Sept. 29), to 372 against South Africa (Oct. 7), and finally to 228 against Japan (Oct. 11).
But there were some other notable Twitter positives for USA Rugby.
Ahead of the Scotland match, Geoff Cameron, a member of the US National Soccer team, tweeted his support to his 199K followers.
Good luck to @USARugby tomorrow vs. Scotland. Do work! #RWC2015 #USARugby ????
— Geoff Cameron (@GeoffCameron) September 26, 2015
While Mr. Cameron had the greatest following of anyone who tweeted about #USARugby during the tourney, it was the magazine @RugbyUnplugged that was the organization’s greatest mouthpiece overall. It tweeted an astounding 402 times throughout the study span, accounting for 20 per cent of all #USARugby mentions (20 times more than the next-most active account). And though he didn’t include the hashtag #USARugby, we still caught wind of South African Minister of Sport Fikile Mbabula’s trolling. That was something. All in all, #RWC15 may have been a disappointment for USA Rugby and its fans, but the support is obviously there and 2019 is just around the corner.
Proud of our players & their efforts/sacrifices for #RWC2015. RT if you agree. Cheers, boys! ????? #BlueNation2015 #usarugby — American Rugby Pod (@AmericaRugbyPod) October 11, 2015
