Fan Satisfaction Index: Ohio State Results

Submitted by OneFootIn on

Note: Sorry this is so late – work and the holidays conspired against me this year.

Sigh. Another regular season ends with a disappointing loss that could have been a win. Buoyed by a great game plan, the Wolverines jumped out to lead, made me break my promise not to have any hope whatsoever, and then the football gods took that hope away and crushed my heart. Again. Yeah, Harbaugh has things pointed in the right direction and the future is bright. But I live in the present and in the present I feel like shit (Edit: this goes double after the Outback Bowl – see part 2).

And so, evidently, do most of you. As I will explain below in just a bit, game satisfaction “without trolls” checked in at 27.7. This was almost identical to the Wisconsin game (28.8). This surprised me some given it was another loss to our biggest rival, though the Wolverines certainly played a better game than most people expected. A less optimistic take, on the other hand, might be that the Michigan fan base has become a bit numb from losing so often to the Buckeyes and that low expectations led to less anger and upset than is sometimes the case.

Figure 1. OSU Game Satisfaction

Season satisfaction (without trolls) also held more or less steady from last week at 36.8. In scientific terms this means the season was…not good. As I discussed last week, even if your rational self knew with great certainty that an 8-4 record was the most likely result of this season, you still felt like shit on Saturday. It turns out that expecting 8-4 and *experiencing” 8-4 are two totally different things. Sure the season probably would have felt worse had we expected to go undefeated, but losing is losing and no one likes it.

Figure 2. Season Satisfaction after OSU

Thus the regular season ended with satisfaction on a decided down note after the "Peters Resurgence."

 

Figure 3 Season Trends

Themes, Thoughts, Trends

Here Come the Trolls

The trolls found our survey. It’s the Internet so I knew it was bound to happen, but still. This is why we can’t have nice things. Of the 227 responses I logged for the OSU survey, I estimate that somewhere between 15 and 33 of them were our enemies – you probably know them as “jive turkeys.”

How do I know they were trolls? Well, if you rated both your game and season satisfaction as 100, as 15 people did, then I’m pretty sure you’re a Buckeye (or possibly a Schadenfreude Sparty) taking the survey for the lulz. Another 5 people rated their game satisfaction as 100 but with a strange variety of other season satisfactions. And another 13 people rated their game satisfaction as somewhere between 80 and 99.

Now, I’m sorry, but an actual living and breathing Michigan fan does not give this game an 80. Did you? If you are a real Michigan fan and you did, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise I have to assume you were high or live in Ohio, or likely both.

That said, after a long conversation with my scientifically inclined son, I realized that in the name of science we couldn’t just delete data, even Buckeye data. So in the interest of transparency and truth and the like, here is your satisfaction sensitivity analysis, under various troll identification parameters.

As you can see, there are enough trolls to make a difference in the results.

Table 1. Who’s Trolling?

Troll ID Rule Game Sat Season Sat

# Clean Responses

# Trolls
Assume no trolls 37.7 42.2 227 0
Game & Season Sat = 100 33.3 38.1 212 15
Game Sat = 100 31.6 38 207 20
Game Sat = 80+ 27.7 36.8 194 33

 

 

 

 

 

Another way to find the trolls is to use a simple scatterplot. As you can see, there is an obvious central cluster and then there are some obvious outliers near the maximums on each axis. These are probably your trolls. It’s even more obvious something’s fishy when you compare this data to the data from Michigan’s wins (which were unlikely to result in opposing fans filling out our survey). In those cases there just aren’t any fans adopting the 0/0 position – so I’m pretty confident we can rule out anyone who answered 100 on both counts.

Figure 4. Scatter Trolls

What I am curious about, though, is what you think the most reasonable cut off point is. Is there any way a Michigan fan gave that a 100 for game satisfaction? Or an 80? Maybe on the notion that the lads did their best and gave the Buckeyes all they could handle, etc., etc.?

The Road Ahead

I was going to point out how there was one more shot at redemption, a chance for at least a moderately optimistic ending on the season.

But since I’m writing this after the Outback Bowl I won’t bother.

Stay tuned for part 2 for results from the Outback Bowl and to see how other B1G fanbases fared this season.

 

Comments

Raizemage11

January 13th, 2018 at 7:55 PM ^

I am not too sure what the survey looks like, so I will just give some general observations:

- You can design a survey with the intent of detecting trolls if you think this is important

- Surveys actually measure some complicated combinations of the answer to the survey and the participants skill at answering surveys. Depending on the design, you might be closer to one end more than the other

- I think there are many non-troll explanations for grading the game 100. For example, A LOT of people were expecting Michigan to get curbed-stomped by OSU. The fact that it was so close might make a logical Michigan fan curve to 100.

>It’s even more obvious something’s fishy when you compare this data to the data from Michigan’s wins (which were unlikely to result in opposing fans filling out our survey). In those cases there just aren’t any fans adopting the 0/0 position – so I’m pretty confident we can rule out anyone who answered 100 on both counts.

This seems like a very odd statement and very odd logic. There is no reason to expect those two scenarios to be correlated. For example: All fans are happy with wins, even if it is ugly (a win is a win). Some fans can find happiness in any situations (life champions, at least we have better academics, etc.)

MinWhisky

January 14th, 2018 at 9:51 AM ^

I found it difficult to interpret the meaning of your Fig .1 & 2 as the y axis was not labeled and there was a definition of the terms Game Feelz and Season Feelz was not provided.

MichaelD

January 14th, 2018 at 3:04 PM ^

The above says it all about how I feel. Beginning of the season I picked us to go 8-4 purely due to our QB situation. Yes the osu game looked great for a quarter but something me knew better then to believe and then we fell into our typical Michigan slumber and got beat by an above average osu team. Then came the cocks and the utter debacle of the second quarter on the 1st of Jan. I guess being a UM fan I have gotton use to being beat by our rivals, top 10 teams and being embrassed on national TV. Does Jim have us on the right track? That’s for another post and another time, I know Brown does! I like the charts it’s touching but fan satisfaction to me is beating the suckeyes. As always GO BLUE!