The State Of Our Open Threads: After Penn State

As I use pizza to absorb the remaining alcohol and therefore regain some shadow of sobriety, I think it is time that we take a look at our experience during last night's game against Penn State. Well, you may not want to do this, but this is how I grieve in these situations, by breaking a situation down into its components and making sense of it. 

First and foremost, the most surprising thing about last night's data - we didn't break any season highs. The 560 fucks we gave does not top the MSU game's 621, but it is good enough for 2nd highest this year. The shits we gave experienced their third second straight week of decline from a high of 233 in the MSU gam to onlt 138 shits in this game. 

The only thing that really took a jump in the upward direction was the talk of firing people, most notably Pep Hamilton, Tim Drevno, the younger Harbaugh and yes, there were a few truly inane people that questioned whether or not Jim himself should have the job. Of course, as there is no plan B and the univesity has made it clear that this talk is a non-starter, we can discount those particular thoughts, we can't discount their disappointment. We were all definitely disappointed - to the tune of "fire" being 1.61 standard deviations above the season average.

Another interesting trend is the slow but steady decline in thread participation overall since Purdue - there was a slight jump of less than 100 posts from MSU to Indiana, but there has been almost a 20% decline overall in that time. There are definitely a lot of reasons for it, some trying to spare themselves the emotional stress, some displaying class bandwagon symptoms and so forth, but it is interesting all the same. 

So, we've seen this pain before, but if you look below, here's what two quick TDs looks like:

So, as you can see with the orange fuck line, which is on the secondary axis, not only was there a high correlation between "fuck" and all tracked words, indicating a highly "fuck"-driven game, but the first quarter or so was...rough on us. As Penn State pulled away at the end, you can see a similar phenomenon, altough by then I suspect a lot of people had left their computers or tosse their phones out the window.

R-squared for "fuck" with respect to all tracked language was 0.93, which is typical of past seasons and shows the slow realignment of our feelings about the season with "fuck". Interestingly, overall swearing efficiency was only up slight from the Indiana game at 2.07, representing 1,262 tracked instances over 2,613 total posts. 

After seven games, the largest portion of our frustration is summarized in these:

"fuck" - 34.78% of all tracked words

"shit - 12.52% of all tracked words

"offense" - 15.87% of all tracked words

"Harbaugh" - 9.94% of all tracked words

"damn" - 6.14% of all tracked words

That's nearly 80% of all tracked words right there, which amounts to something like "fuck shit offense damn Harbaugh" or something. I am pretty sure someone somewhere said that last night. Pretty sure.