The State Of Our Open Threads - After Maryland

There isn't too much to say about the Maryland game when it comes to our open thread except that it was, in terms of how the threads have gone this season, only slightly more stressful for the board than the Rutgers thread. The Maryland and Rutgers threads tend to be two of the smaller threads, although this was not the case in 2014 when we lost both of these games. Of course, now we're dangerously close to awful memories and we don't want to delve into those here. 

Once in a rare while, we give less fucks than we do, well, other things, and that actually happened yesterday. We only gave 91 fucks, which is the second lowest total this season and far, far below the season average of 260 fucks per game. Indeed, "fuck" was a comfortable third on the list of tracked words this time around, behind two words that were foremost on my own mind certainly. "Shea" and "offense". You see, if it were up to the average fan, we'd never lose and we would beat everyone by at least 1,000, so imagine the disappointment of some when we only won by 31 points yesterday.

The 57 shits and the 16 damns are also the second lowest totals this season, and both again just barely above the totals for Rutgers. Relatively speaking, this was a low stress affair, and indeed, when you can appear to mail it in on some drives and still beat anyone 38-7, I dare say that you're achieving at a decently high level as a football team. However, you're not here for my minor criticisms of yesterday's performance. There are indeed some interesting items in the data.

One of them is the somewhat elevated rate of "suck", and much of it was tied to the relatively high mentions of "Shea" in the thread. The participants in the thread weren't terribly pleased with the overall performance of our starting QB, but then some of these same people weren't terribly pleased with the performance of McCaffery either. I am beginning to believe that a lot of football fans would be happiest, in fact, cheering for a team that had no quarterback to speak of, because at least then there isn't anyone who sucks or is otherwise inadequate in their eyes. 

It's not just the quarterback, of course. There is the entire offense to consider, and indeed, some of that "suck" was tied to the 94 instances of "offense". It is, after all, Maryland, and we should be able to beat Maryland by at least 4,500 or so if indeed we could get "speed in space" off the ground, as that phrase saw it's fourth highest number of mentions this year. All that said, we at least recognized that it wasn't entirely on Harbaugh, who saw his third lowest total of mentions this season. 

This thread was actually the second smallest one in 2019 - only 1,358 posts, but with 640 total instances of tracked words, we managed an overall efficiency of 2.12, which is consistent with wins in the Harbaugh era, albeit wins which are somewhat less than thrilling. I suppose I get that - it was Maryland, and going into a bye only to come out of it to face a team which makes their game with us their biggest of the season even in years where they blow chunks, we do need to remain vigilant. 

What is difficult to believe is that there are only three games left in the regular season. Man, how the time flies, and how this feature will be interesting this November.