The State Of Our Open Threads: After Nebraska

Well, it was another quiet day in the open thread, with very little of note. 

*everyone gets up, starting to leave*

HOLD ON, PLEASE....

Anyway, we will talk about a couple interesting trends. Actually, let's start with overall efficiency this time, which is sort of an intensity metric, speaking a bit to how strong the feelings actually are. Here's what we have managed:

It has been very stable, as you see. Historically, in the Harbaugh era, something between about 3.00 and 2.00 has related to a relative level of comfort with the result, with anything above 3.00 almost being no realizable worry at all. Without telling a long story, this is essentially the number of posts in the thread over the number of instances of words being tracked, so for example, in a 1,500 post thread, 750 instances of tracked words would be an efficiency of 2.00. It's a 10,000-foot view, as they say, and there are more specific metrics that add to the picture. Some of you know that - that explanation is for the uninitiated. In any case, we've been, well, mellow overall. It's certainly a change from a few seasons ago. 

One thing I did see - people trying to pad the numbers again. As much as I laugh, it does add to the time it takes to do this because I have to manually find where people are typing "fuck" times whatever, and just so you know, you get awarded exactly one for the effort, MeanJoe. There is a base assumption that you meant the one. The rest is just noise. I am a nice man like that. 

As for the number of "fucks given less faux outrage" (that needs to be a new metric), it was 91 fucks, down from the 97 we gave the week before. Nearly all of it was positively oriented this time, of course, as it was in the Rutgers game minus the initial outburst in the first half where we came out....uninspired. The number of shits given, however, was down markedly - 55 last week, but only 25 this week. See the efficiency again, however, and it is sort of difficult to give a really good shit when, at the moment, you are winning quite handily generally. Such is fandom. 

Only 31 instances of "fire" came out of that thread, and only 34 instances of "suck". Much of it jokingly again, of course, with some of it directed at the Fox Sports people for giving us 1,000,000 commercials, half of which were the stupid Big Ten commercial, which by the way, shall have a different look next year (something like this): 

Back to the numbers - the running "fuck-shit" chart now looks like this:

Our overall general concern for "offense" and "defense" is waning just a bit in the wake of the Nebraska game:

As I mentioned last week, generally "offense" seems to overtake "defense" as we slide into conference play, but this far, they are roughly trailing each other. I would think this is because we haven't been challenged much yet, and at some point, we will see where the greater worry sits. Of course, this is a backloaded schedule, so this moment may not come for a month. 

Here are the normalized values for certain words as they now stand:

So, this won't surprise anyone - Rutgers is probably the most harrowing game to date overall, and it wasn't even that harrowing aside from the first 3-4 minutes thanks to blown coverage. Don't worry, we still have seven opportunities to fix that. (NOTE TO TEAM: DO NOT READ THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE.)

So, we'll leave there for now - Minnesota is on the clock. The Big Ten West is a raging tire fire and we're just so glad to not be part of it, right?