The State Of Our Open Threads: After Northwestern

Let me say that this game actually made me briefly reconsider the Mood Chart just a bit. Here's the reason:

We won, and yet here it sits, cleanly in the "Anger" quadrant. I then thought about this a little more, and yes, I was still upset after that game as I imagine most folks were, and about a lot of things. For example, I am upset about having to win at least 1 of the next 2 to even sniff a bowl, about an offense that can only manage 10 points against a Northwestern team doing an equally good impersonation of futility to our own, etc...After a while, it made sense to me so I left it.

In any case, some interesting shifts in our language did occur, but while the raw totals would declare another victory for "fuck" at 178 fucks in a thread of 2,002 posts, it was the uptick in "suck" that was significant. We said we would at the beginning of the game, and we as a blog embraced the suck. Indeed, look at the normalized values.

"Damn" and "suck" clearly got more airplay than they typically do, although we had some practice embracing the suck during the Michigan State game as you can see above. The important thing is that we had no trouble taking the theme of the game to heart because damn, we suck, right?

We were fairly efficient in this game for reasons already mentioned. Here's that update:

4.31 is within shouting distance of a few games this year, so while this was not the shock that Notre Dame was, it definitely made us experience some Utah-esque irritation and disillusionment, the sole difference from a result standpoint being tht we won in this case. We simply weren't happy about it, that's all. If there is a lesson here, it is that a pyrrhic victory in football definitely exists. 

The "Fuck-Fire" dynamic got some airplay on a few other blogs this week, or so I found out when trying to reference older diaries via Google. Here's that one this week:

It would seem to indicate that we're getting to a point where we've given most of the fucks we're going to give, and that we might be more or less resigned that someone will get fired in the next few weeks. Actually last night, Nussmeier, Funk and "the team" bore the brunt of the canning talk. A fair number of people not only want the house cleaned, but set ablaze and rebuilt, it would seem.

So, if there is a game this year so far which underscores the weird place many of us are undoubtedly at as Michigan fans, it is this game....and we won it.