Coverage and methodology

What we monitor

• Source: X (formerly Twitter) recent search, through the official X API. No other platforms yet.
• Queries: 3 monitored searches: the 16 AFC team names, the 16 NFC team names, and NFL news terms (injury, questionable, ruled out, trade, signed, released, waived, depth chart). English posts, reposts excluded.
• Volume: the newest 10 posts per search, collected every 6 hours. That is a small, recency-biased sample of NFL conversation, not all of it.
• Players: stories are tagged with all 32 teams and a curated list of verified active players from official rosters. Other players can't be searched yet; search their team instead.
• NFL only. No other leagues in this beta.

How stories are built

• Duplicate posts are removed by post ID and link.
• Posts are grouped when they share a team or player and a topic (injury news, roster moves, game discussion, coaching news, draft talk, or recent mentions when no topic is detected) within a 6-hour window. Teams, players and topics are tagged automatically from each post when it is collected; the post text is then discarded. Grouping can be wrong; an admin can merge, split or hide stories.
• Story titles are written by Sports Wall from the tagged team or player and topic, for example “Baltimore Ravens: Roster moves”. They are not taken from any post.
• We don't store, quote or summarize the text of X posts, and no AI reads them. Open each original post on X to read it.
• Story images are illustrations made for Sports Wall. They are not photographs and don't show real events, players or team logos.

What “Rising” means

Counts are posts in our monitored searches, not mentions across all of X or the internet. A story is marked Rising only when it has at least 3 posts from at least 2 authors in the last 60 minutes, compared with its average hourly count over the previous 24 hours, and after at least 24 hours of comparable collection history. Until then, stories are shown by recency. Every Rising label opens the exact counts behind it.

Freshness and limits

• Collection runs every 6 hours. This is not a real-time feed and may miss breaking news.
• The header shows the last successful update. If collection is delayed, stories stay visible with a delayed notice. Missing data is not zero activity.
• Collected records are deleted after 30 days. Up to 50 posts a day are re-checked, and deleted or unavailable posts are removed from stories.
• Publication time is when the author posted; collection time is when we fetched it. Both are shown.

Spot a problem?

Use “Report a problem” on any story, or the feedback page. See Privacy for what we collect.

Last updated November 8, 2026.