The State Of Our Open Threads - After Iowa

Well, if anything can be learned from our reaction to the Iowa game, which at least in my own opinion was probably one of the ugliest wins I've seen us pull out in a while (well, the Army game too, of course), it is that even our wins make us give pause to our prospects for the remainder of the season. Given the way the numbers played out for the words that get tracked, we didn't exactly come out of the BIg House yesterday liking what we saw or may indeed see soon enough.

For the first time in a few seasons, "fuck" did not grab the primary headline. Even though there were 255 fucks given, it was not the winner among tracked words. That said, many of those fucks were tied to the word which did top our list, and that was "offense", which managed 300 hits. Better still, it rather ties into the third most mentioned word among those which are tracked, and that was "Shea". So, there was indeed a running theme in the thread yesterday, and since all of you were either there or in front of a TV perhaps, it shouldn't shock you - we hated the offense, we told it to "fuck _______ " at various points, and the performance of Shea Patterson came along for the ride in our displeasure.

It gets even more interesting, of course. This game saw the season high for instances of "suck" at 71 instances, which is even higher than Wisconsin's 68. Much of that was tied to our offense as well, but also Harbaugh and Gattis. Indeed, there is growing impatience regarding "speed in space", but it also gets discussed less and less, with only nine mentions this game. "Speed in space" managed 56 mentions during the Army game, which is the season high for that term and incidentally a season high for sarcasm. 

There were 36 calls for firing someone during the game, with most of these being directed at Harbaugh and Gattis. Some of them were facetious, but some of them were not. Actually, many of the ones directed at Gattis were not, come to think of it. Five games in and many are ready to see something new on offense, but then those same people also talk about identity on offense. It strikes me that the definition of "fan" somehow includes being given to thoughts which are roundly self-contradictory, but as I am not the best fan myself, I don't have much room to talk, I suppose.

As much as we fawned over the defensive performance, keeping in mind that the blandness of Iowa's offense is basically the sort of thing that Don Brown plans for in his sleep, it only managed to get discussed 197 times. I found that rather disappointing, because for me personally, it was the only thing I was talking about where I was watching the game. Someone actually wanted my thoughts on the offense, and I pretended to hurl over the railing, much to the chagrin of the people below apparently. Simulated chucking is considered almost as rude as the actual act. I suppose this makes sense. 

For the general numbers - the thread size was 2,131 posts, and the 1,351 tracked instances made for an overall efficiency of 1.58. That's actually the best on the season, beating out Wisconsin's 1.79 and Army's 1.82. If you consider that, especially in the Harbaugh era, anything better than 2.00 basically denotes either a stressful win or an outright loss, then this season we are 2-1 so far in such games. I am sure that means for you what it means for me - you're tipsy by the end of the game.

Hopefully, we can hover closer to sobriety as we play Illinois.