The State Of Our Open Threads: After Indiana

Submitted by LSAClassOf2000 on

We've officially hit the halfway point of the season and we can take a look back at some base performance measures as it pertains to our use of certain language in open threads.

First one interesting phenomenon - after six games, the average total number of posts in open threads was 1,761 posts last year. This year, it is up to 2,631 posts, and typically this has much to do with the schedule, the number of people who visit the liveblog (which seems to be less this year) and the bump in new users that we get in the latter half of summer (which seems to b a lot this year). That's a huge jump. 

Of course, it has been a stressful season for us as well despite being 5-1, as we're averaging 361.25 fucks per game so far in 2017, which is slightly over twice the average over the same time last year - 177.67. It's a similar story with "shit" - after six game last year, the average was 61.16, but this year it is 140.75. "Suck" and "fire" are both at levels over twice last year's as well - three times last year for "suck", in fact. 

Let's talk about the Indiana game specifically now - 

We gave 421 fucks in this game, which honestly seems like a subpar effort to me as there were so many things to say "fuck" about in this game despite winning, but we'll show you where a good portion of the fucks clustered in a bit. It is, oddly enough, a tie with Purdue for the 2nd most fucks so far this year, so if the word is indeed its own metric when it comes to fan experience, we had a similar overall experience as we did in that game. 

It's a similar story with the 149 shits we gave during this game - very close to Purdue's 154 shits given and good enough for a competitive third place in the games so far this season. Of course, the word selection in this ongoing experiment is deliberate, but it is interesting to see certain words follow these very regular trends, right down to having some interesting cut-off lines for wins and losses. Anyway, you'll see that work later in the season. 

One thing that was rather surprising is that the calls for someone to be fired and the number of posts proclaiming that we suck both went down even as the chatter about how the offense couldn't find a hole in a crater-filled landscape increased sharply in this game. We spun our wheels in the rain against MSU, but only 197 mentions of the offense were generated, and granted, we had Karan Higdon to look forward to yesterday and not all the chatter was gloomy, but among the 246 posts about the offense, there was not a lot of hope dispensed. 

Here's what all that looked like across the game:

InstancesByPageIndiana

R-squared for "fuck" was 0.83 in this game, so we are coming back to that word as a driving factor for expressing ourselves in these games. Keep in mind too that each page represents 300 comments and about 6 minutes of regulation play (OT factors into 9 and 10 here). You can see "fuck" spike right where you would think - end of the 4th quarter and in OT. The pace of talk on the offense, which is in gray, was fairly steady throughout the second half. 

Overall efficiency for this game was 2.28, which is consistent with our unfulfilling and hollow victories, or at least that's how we seem to view them. Again, this is eerily similar to the Purdue experience. That is based on 1,303 tracked instances across 2,972 posts. 

Given the trend of the season to date, the aftermath of Penn State should be....intriguing. 

Other Andrew

October 15th, 2017 at 9:18 AM ^

... how the fuckery correlates with both mgopoints and joining date. I am guessing this would require a lot of work and therefore not worth it. And it’s totally meta/useless as it pertains to the football team’s performance. But it would give some insight as to what’s driving the vibe ‘round these parts.

jabberwock

October 15th, 2017 at 11:01 AM ^

based on home/away games.

The participation level for threads for away games has to be higher than home games right?



I'm also not season ticket holder either but it probably changes a bit for Rutgers vs. OSU and who decided to go to the game or sell their ticket to me.

I had soccer games yesterday, so sadly i could contribute 0 fucks to the threads ;-(

BALDA55ARRE

October 15th, 2017 at 11:11 AM ^

If we can't figure out how to complete a pass we're going to lose 3 more games. Bring in Peters O'korn sucks. Oh yea I almost forgot 16 penalties are you fucking kidding me.