Once again in the Harbaugh era, it feels like we escaped with a victory, and as a result, we are now 4-0 and in a good position to have a potentially laughable game against Wisconsin in that the final score could very well be 6-3 or something brutal like that. I mean, obviously I would take a win, but as yesterday shows (and has countless games over the last fifteen years or so of Michigan football have shown), how we feel about a win is important and worth discussion, and we did not have a warm, fuzzy feeling about it as a group. 

So, how did we feel about as it was happening? I will just say that there were fewer fucks given than I would have actually thought - only 176 of them, to be exact. Still, when you consider that we only generated 18 of them last week, that's 9.8 times the fucks and probably a corresponding overall increase in fan stress. It's charted in comparison to "fire" here:

In the Harbaugh era, and in the Hoke era when this collection effort began, there has always been at least a mild correlation between our use of "fuck" and our wanting of heads, and while four games isn't telling, you can see they do trail each other somewhat. Normally, this relationship will solidify by the time the OSU rolls around. I can only imagine why that is. 

Speaking of "fire", we used it 37 times, mostly regarding Josh Gattis and the comatose playcalling of the second half. It's fairly clear now that "speed in space" looks a lot like transwarp drive on the USS Excelsior in Star Trek III and someone - possibly Scotty - has removed all the relays from its interface with the main computer. That's slightly less than the 41 at Washington, but a lot more than the 9 that were in the NIU thread. At least those were in jest. 

We did set a season high for "shit", with 76 mentions of that, as well as 31 instances of "suck", both because...well, you saw it too, I assume. 

Perhaps not to anyone's surprise, these two tend to follow each other historically too. We played like shit, we suck, we've heard it all over the last several years, but these two words are by far the most common and the most telling. Again, compared to the NIU game, yesterday made us considerably more uneasy, and that is of course the predictable pattern of these threads - the most profanity, in fact comes when the margin of victory / loss has been a touchdown or less. 

We spent the entire summer expressing some concerns about the defense and the offense, and now that we've actually played four games, here's what that one looks like:

That certainly shouldn't surprise anyone - we spent a lot of time concerned about the offense during a game we won rather handily against Washington, then a week where we didn't really care too much about it, then yesterday, we were frazzled by all of it really. If that's how you felt and you didn't even crack open the game thread, take heart in knowing that you certainly were not alone - the most engaged portion of the Michigan fanbase that I know, the regulars here, felt the same way you did. 

So, overall, there were 1,000 instances of tracked language across 1,882 posts, which makes for an efficiency of 1.88 for the thread, and that in itself is significant to this study because anything less than 2.0 in the Harbaugh era has been almost entirely losses with maybe a couple of exceptions. This is a rare example of the victory that we hated. That's fine, however - I think that, as fans, we should question the mechanics of the game and how the victory came to be, for it isn't just the win, it is how it happened. 

Well, all this leads me to believe next week will be....interesting.