The State Of Our Open Threads: After Iowa

We still have one game to play, but MGoBlog is to be commended for reaching what could very well stand as its swearing climax yesterday. Between all the tracked words / references, we beat the Penn State game by 13 instances, bringing the year-to-date total to 4,565 instances of the tracked words and making this game the second straight week we've cussed 30% more than the previous week. Indeed, we did 39.77% better than last week, carried largely by a 36.31% increase in "fuck" and a 36.47% increase in the references to firing someone. In general, rage has begun to reach a crescendo. 

The summary data:

	TOTAL	AVERAGE	STD. DEV.	% OF TOTAL
"fuck"	2170	197.27	172.87	47.54%
"shit"	532	48.36	28.96	11.65%
"damn"	420	38.18	42.96	9.20%
"fire"	459	41.73	51.21	10.05%
"suck"	508	46.18	32.77	11.13%
"ass"	299	27.18	27.27	6.55%
"put in Morris"	177	16.09	17.47	3.88%

Some general notes - 

*The number of posters who wanted to bench Gardner in favor of Morris more than doubled from last week, bringing the MGoCalls for QB change to 177 instances. It should be noted that the reason for this seems to have shifted from actual rage and more curiosity about how Morris would perform in theory, which is rage stripped of the emotional component. 

*The relative distribution of "fuck" has held steady basically - 47.54% of overall tracked words are "fucks", but "shit" made a strong showing this week as did "suck". Indeed, there was one person on Twitter (which I don't track) who hit the trifecta and say "Shit, we fuckin' suck". If only that had been in the Open Thread. We still rely a lot on the interjection "fuck" regardless of positive or negative associations to plays in the game. 

*A big "WOW" to this statistic - we managed an instance of one of the tracked words every 1.62 posts this week, a huge jump from last week's ratio of 3.50. What it means, of course, is that in a smaller number of posts, we had pure, concentrated profanity. That is the season's biggest jump in what I will call the "Swearing Efficiency Quotient". We may not mix our words much, but we're becoming very good at utilizing them in a small space.

Here is the normalized data:

You can see the trend in recent games here is towards full discontent with the season. Indeed, Iowa and Northwestern are now the only games where the Z-scores of each tracked word were all positive. Indeed, the average Z-score of the track words was nearly TRIPLE last week's average, so if you every wanted numerical proof of ANGAR, then you now have it. Interestingly, the Penn State game still leads for the relative concentration of "damn" and "ass", possibly because of our disbelief during and after that game. Akron and UConn still compete for the concentration of "suck", possibly due to the turnovers. Good god, the turnovers. 

Here is the bar chart with the game-to-game trend in totals:

If there is a phrase which describes those last four games, it might very well be "urge to kill rising". I am pretty sure we've all felt this on a primal level watching lately.

Here is the rampant increase in "fuck" and "fire", and you can see that these two words somehow track each other on MGoBlog:

I thought about posting the "Shit-Damn Dynamic", but it is basically doing the same thing as you see above, just to a lesser extent. 

Here is the Mood Chart, which graphically shows you where Iowa sits in the adjusted data. It is clearly the most concentrated expression of frustration yet this year: