So, there are times I watch our offense and think to myself:

"Transwarp at your command, sir."

Some of you know what happens next in this scene, of course, which is not much - and to be fair, it isn't that way all the time, but on occasion, it feels like that. That's kind of how the first half felt yesterday, never mind that we managed to get worked a bit in the beginning by tempo - big shock, I know. 

It resulted in a lot of unfortunate language in our living room, and indeed, in the open thread, but yet somehow, at the end of the day, the numbers suggest we felt a little better about this game than we did after Maryland, which I found interesting but not entirely surprising. 

We will start with the most impressive statistic first - the 251 fucks given in the thread yesterday, which is adjusted some for attempts to inflate the total (although I sympathize with those people - I had a similar thought in the moment), is nearly double the 136 fucks given for the Iowa game. Although I don't do a quarter-by-quarter breakdown normally, I will tell you that much of those came in the second quarter, when it definitely seemed like it was going to be one of THOSE Indiana games, which should never really happen but somehow does because they do everything we aren't built for - at least for a half, before we get the Indiana version of turtling. 

The performance of "shit" wasn't nearly as prolific, but yesterday's 122 shits given definitely bests the 93 given for Iowa, but notably, it is only slightly higher than the Maryland shits - 118, to be exact. Historically, the blog has managed about two fucks for one shit, but the gap is narrowing some this year, so with a different crowd and slightly elevated engagement in these threads, we're getting some different behavior. Coming off a season like the last one helps too, of course. Anyway, here's the "fuck" / "shit" trend:

"Fire" has always been a great indication of how we're feeling about the staff, and we definitely had feelings about certain people on the coaching staff yesterday. It is rather amazing, when you think about it, that we're a 6-0 team and yet, we sometimes want to see everyone - or certain people - gone in a moment of pique. I suppose we should all be glad we're not running things. In any case, the 47 instances of "fire" yesterday we largely directed at Weiss, Moore and Minter, and much of it was first half frustrations again. It's a similar story with "suck", of course - by some accounts, despite the record, we do "suck", which makes it feel like Wake Forest when they are having one of their better years if that's how you feel, I would think. 

The "defense" / "offense" dynamic has been an interesting one all year - for as long as I've been doing this, these two tend to be quite out of whack, if you will. That is to say, we are definitely talking about one a lot more than the other, or indeed, they would flip midseason, or something like that, but they haven't done this before:

As you can see, they have been quite close, with offensive concerns only slightly overtaking defensive ones yesterday. It's been very interesting to see the blog equally satisfied (or dissatisfied?) with either side of the ball. 

There isn't much movement on the so-called "QB battle", but of course, we know why that is - Cade is A) clearly the backup, no matter what a certain guy on Twitter says, and B) out at the moment anyway. Still, he doesn't escape mention, and indeed, one or two people yesterday pondered the possibility of having him in there - if it had been possible (it is not, obviously). 

You'll remember - the two of you who read this will anyway - last week when I said that I rather enjoy the normalized look at the threads because it tells you how cheesed off we actually were in a lot of cases, or how concerned, if you want to be a bit more polite about it. Here is that view now:

I think we are at a point where we can safely say that we will not best the overall serenity of the UConn game, and clearly, yesterday was our most stressful experience yet, followed closely by Maryland. It almost makes me look forward to next week for the charting alone. 

The efficiency metric has been fairly steady this year actually, which means that despite spikes in stress in a couple games, we've managed to swear at a relatively even pace despite two of these open threads reaching almost 3,000 posts. In the case of Indiana, overall efficiency was 2.38, which corresponds to a stressful win in the Harbaugh era, with 1,177 instances of tracked words across 2,799 posts. 

So, we now turn our attention to Penn State. Typically, this is a good test of how put together we are as a blog to withstand adversity, moreso than other games really, oddly enough. I look forward to that discussion.