The National Football League (NFL) season officially begins Thursday with an opening matchup between the Green Bay Packers and last year’s Super Bowl champions, the Seattle Seahawks. In fact, the NFL season never ends — it just heats up more when games are actually being played.

According to an analysis of data collected by Adobe Systems Inc.’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) Adobe Digital Index (ADI), social buzz about the NFL is higher than for any other major U.S. professional or college sport. Two months before the new NFL season was set to begin, the league received nearly 2 million mentions on social media. One month before the season starts, that number rises to nearly 4 million, and by the end of August Adobe projects 5 million social mentions. Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association trail in second and third places respectively, while college football finishes fourth.

An unexpected result of the analysis is that 21% of social buzz about the NFL comes from outside the United States. And the team with the broadest international appeal is the New York Giants, which gets about one-third of its social buzz from more than 100 other countries. Who would have guessed that?

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The players (mostly bad) off-field behavior drives negative sentiment up to 55% until the first preseason game is played. Then sentiment flips to 69% positive.

Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback Johnny Manziel generates more social buzz than any other NFL quarterback, and he hasn’t even thrown a pass in a game that counts yet. More in line with reality, of the top 100 players as rated at NFL.com, the one garnering the most social buzz is Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ QB who is about to start his 15th season.

Over the past 30 days the top 10 football teams based on social buzz includes three college football teams: the LSU Tigers, the USC Trojans and the Texas Longhorns. The college teams ranked fourth, fifth and 10th. The team getting the most social buzz was the New York Giants, followed by the San Francisco 49ers. The Dallas Cowboys finished ninth, just ahead of the Longhorns.

The Chicago Bears were not among the top 10. “Bear Down, Chicago Bears, Bear Down.”

ADI’s analysis, which is based on more than 15 million social mentions related to the NFL and college football, captured social buzz through Adobe Social from blogs, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Twitter, Dailymotion, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, VK, Disqus, Foursquare, Metacafe, WordPress and YouTube.

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