The State Of Our Open Threads: After Maryland

If you were watching on television yesterday, they kept saying it was the very definition of a trap game, where Michigan could be caught looking ahead to the point where we accidentally negated much of the meaning of this year's rendition of the game, namely the part where the Big Ten East is on the line. While it seemed for a time that we were going to play a game of chicken with the trap, we did manage to avoid it, so we are now 11-0 and going into Rivalry Week in a state - MOSTLY - that we thought we might. 

"Mostly"? Well, obviously there has been this Big Ten / NCAA bullshit on the side. 

That ongoing saga has created an interesting effect actually. For much of the season prior to Michigan State (which was around the week the Connor Stalions stuff broke), we weren't talking about our head coach much at all, at least not compared to previous years, where he was a central figure in a lot of threads. Now, we have this:

A few major things are at play here, of course. One of them is the normal incremental increase in tension and the increasing difficulty of opponent as well as, in one case, a rivalry game. A considerable portion of the bump this year, has been the off-field stories, and indeed, the climax thus far has been what went on leading up to Penn State, where the Big Ten laid down this suspension while the team was in the air. Clearly, by yesterday, with the other shifts in the story, we've begun to accept aspects of this, and the Harbaugh mentions slid to a level more typical for the time of season, not to mention a content more typical for the time of season. The sole difference being, of course, that Jim is not there during the game. 

Let's talk a little about general participation as well. As I mentioned last week, the size of the Penn State thread essentially blew up all the season averages to that point, and the Maryland game has further skewed them, although not by as much. After all, it was a slightly smaller thread compared to Penn State - only 3,387 posts at the end of the game this time.  Before Penn State, the average thread size this season was only 1,522 posts, but it has now jumped to 1,865 posts in the last two weeks, so we've definitely been busy. The blue bars on this tell some of that story:

The blue bars show how much tracked instances in each game thread contributes to the cumulative total during the season. This is just the conference schedule, but Penn State and Maryland by themselves account for 38.15% of all the tracked instances of words this season, not to mention 33.85% of all posts in all open threads thus far. Even so, efficiency has been relatively even through the last three games (2.29 yesterday, up only slightly from 2.32 last week, and less than the 2.26 at Purdue), if somewhat elevated, so while we've been a bit more stressed, it hasn't fluctuated violently as in other seasons. Overall, we are definitely calmer - relatively speaking - than in the past.

We can see these things in other ways, of course:

 

Normalized values are, of course, a lot of things in statistics, but here we are just using them to evaluate usage of certain word against their mean usage in threads. Even though you are only seeing the conference schedule here, what we get is basically a bunch of games where, with noted exceptions here and there, usage doesn't stray TOO far from the mean, and then Penn State and Maryland, which are on a different planet altogether mostly. I suppose I expected that, when I think about it, but the steepness of the increase has been amazing so far. Well, I say "so far" - there's only one game to go, so there isn't much farther to go really. ANYWAY...the larger point is that we've destroyed all the averages in the last two weeks, causing significant upward shifts just about everywhere. 

That includes here, of course:

For a lot of reasons, "defense" showed up a bit more than "offense" in the thread yesterday, but they were both, well, they were. What has been interesting is how closely they have trailed each other all year, showing significant separation only yesterday, I would say. As always, a lot of things are part of that, but Maryland definitely came into that game upset-minded, even though we denied it to them. Also, staffing changes played somewhat into that - I call them "staffing changes", but yeah, the absence of Jim mainly. I think there is an effect, even as we keep winning anyway. 

Mentions of JJ as a function of the offense have been interesting over the last couple weeks as well:

It doesn't mean too much in a study like this, but we can talk about the correlation coefficient of these, as it is 0.729 at the moment. When we talk "offense", we have a tendency to talk about the QB. That, of course, should not shock anyone - that's the entire point of this, seeing the numbers bear it out in real time essentially. Obviously, WHY we do this is also something we should discuss, for especially in the last few weeks, we've talked a lot about JJ being "off", as many term it. Since PSU, in fact, we've talked about him being underutilized as well. We know about Michigan and the November playbook being super secret and late-season games no looking terribly convincing as a result, but it drives us batty in real time. 

Some of you are here for the fucks, of course - there were 362 fucks given yesterday, which is the second most this year after Penn State's 475. We did manage a season high in shits given at 154, however, as well as a season high in mentions of "defense" (200), "offense" (170) and JJ (311). I am sure we can easily shatter any of these, or indeed all of them, next  Saturday in a glorious crescendo of spleen. 

So, see you then, folks. It's Hate Week.