The State Of Our Open Threads: After Florida

Submitted by LSAClassOf2000 on

First and foremost, welcome to another season of Michigan football and the weekly attempt to dissect certain facets of the in-game experience for all of us.

Based on some feedback I received from folks in August, we're going to change out a few words. For example, we looked at instances of "Peppers" last year, but as he's no longer here, we're going to look at "secondary" and related terms because that was a concern for some of us. In addition, you'll see us look at "youth", "offensive line" and other things which may or may not bear the brunt of some of the saltier posts which appear in the open threads for games. 

Typically, there's not much datawise to discuss after the first game - no averages, standard deviations, points on the Mood Chart and so forth. However, the raw totals are intriguing - we gave 250 fucks and 86 shits against 2,214 total posts across two threads. "Harbaugh" took a backseat in mentions, unlike last year, at a mere 27 instances, whereas people brought up the secondary and the offensive line 41 and 40 times respectively. 

Other highlights - 28 instances of "fire", which is pretty high, but it was mostly directed at our lovely Big XII officials. There were 31 "suck" posts, with about half of them directed at WIlton Speight. We did think some things were "nice", however, with 42 of those peppered across the posts. 

One thing we are going to try and do this season for certain games is get a read on overall stress, so below you'll see - by page of threads - the total number of tracked words per page graphed. At eight pages, we'll make a blanket assumption that each page represents roughly 7 minutes and some change of regulation play or about 22 minutes of airtime, however you want to view it. Anyway, it looks like this:

InstancesByPageFlorida

So, if the trend is accurate, and that looks right for me anyway, then as we obviously experienced, the first half was where we had most of our fits. The orange line is the "fuck" line, which has an R-squared of 0.951 when compared to the overall data, so this was a fuck-driven game. 

It will be a few games before there's real comparison data, but the overall swearing efficiency for this game was 3.44, which corresponds to historic data on stressful wins. 

Anyway, that's all for now - have an excellent week, folks. 

MGoBoard
Football

LSAClassOf2000

September 3rd, 2017 at 10:19 AM ^

I actually began doing this four years ago as a way to decompress from games, and it actually still helps me do that. Beer helps too, of course, but I thought combining one of my talents with my own sense of humor might once in a while yield a nice feature. 

Joined: 01/07/2011

MGoPoints: 130610

MGlobules

September 3rd, 2017 at 9:52 AM ^

this is the first time I'm really checking in on this convo. But the number of hysterical people who say "whoa is us, all is lost" at the beginning of games, or who say a player sucks when they make a mistake in games, is embarrassing. Clearly, people tend to calm down a little as games wear on (trend lines will obviously vary according to outcomes), but although I was an early enthusiast of mgoblog game threads I have started to avoid them--too much hysteria and negativity.

Too little faith. 

To me sitting there writing that some fantastic athlete "sucks" or is never going to be any good, etc. just. . . begs a little more self-awareness, equanimity. Fucking creativity.  

That said, there is a lot of hilarious and insightful stuff at times.

I know that mgoblog is a big tent, and that that's part of the charm. But sometimes. . . we can do better.  

Joined: 11/17/2008

MGoPoints: 47549

SF Wolverine

September 3rd, 2017 at 10:27 AM ^

is why I encourage you all to bevel some guilt today.  This is the kind of content -- fun, but with some real analytical energy behind it -- that appears on MGB and places like five thirty-eight, but damn near nowhere else.  

Joined: 10/04/2010

MGoPoints: 24906