The State Of Our Open Threads: After Indiana

At least among those I talked to throughout this past week, I think that we, like perhaps many of you, were expecting one of THOSE Indiana games, where it was infuriatingly more complex than it should have been yet somehow we would emerge victorious. Indeed, for a time yesterday, it looked like that might be the case as it seemed that the shootout version of "The Indiana Game" was about to make an appearance, but it became a much less eventful affair after that, and even gave some a little hope that we might at least compete against OSU - for how long remains to be seen, of course.

Last year, the Indiana game resulted in 341 fucks given in the game thread, but this year, we only gave 138 fucks, and nearly 10% of them we given by someone who posted a rant about Josh Gattis. That said, we gave 87 shits, which is just a little short of the season average of 94 shits, so there was that. Actually, for a second time this season, the mentions of "Shea" outpaced the "fucks", although to be fair, those two words appeared in the same post a few dozen times, which is also about average for us this season. Our feelings for our QB are, to say the least, complex. 

There were only 28 instances of "suck" this time, much of that directed at the defense and nearly all of them in the first third of the game or so, before the defense seemed to settle down and adjust. There wasn't a lot of action on the "fire" front either - many of the negative ones were directed at Don Brown, but there were also some instances of people saying the team was playing with "fire". Well, those came after the game was comfortably in hand, of course. There were only 16 mentions of "speed in space", but in a trend that has been forming since the end of the Penn State game, only a few of them were likely sarcastic. 

Overall, there were 730 instances of tracked words across a thread that was 1,587 posts long, which gives us a swearing efficiency of 2.17 and for the fourth straight game, an efficiency consistent with the more comfortable wins of the Harbaugh era. It is interesting to note that, although the average thread size this season is 2,053 posts, this is about 300 posts smaller than last year, so the new format for the blog might be affecting contributions to these threads. All the same, without those contributions, there wouldn't be much to say about our state of fandom around here. 

Speaking of that, we're now in Hate Week, and the OSU thread usually breaks records for this feature - it's OWN records, mind you.