The State Of Our Open Threads - After Penn State

Well, in a game where I think we can all agree that our football team showed some heart and some passion, something that I believe some doubted, we still came up short and there was indeed some frustration expressed about various aspects of the game. While the game thread didn't exactly break any season highs except for one, it does give us some interesting things to talk about. 

Now, I will say this first, because it does affect the results a little bit - there were two game threads created initially, and I did not get rid of the duplicate because, like many other fans, I was far too invested in the game to even bother with the blog too much, so I took the posts across all three combined threads (two originals plus the second half thread someone created) and used the numbers for all of them. 

So, what did we achieve?

We gave 443 fucks last night, which I actually thought to be surprisingly low, but numbers are what they are, of course, and as you might expect, this time a fair number of the fucks were related to the officiating, which was.....fucked. Still, some of them were directed at the plays and the playcalling and the coaches and the normal things that evoke a "fuck". It is worth noting as well that 443 fucks does not top the Army game, which produced 546 fucks, but it does top the 335 fucks produced in the Wisconsin thread, but again, I firmly believe people gave up in the second half. 

This leads us to something of note actually.

As we have seen during several games in the Harbaugh era, there has been a decoupling of "fucks" and wins. Under Hoke, the relationship was rather strong, but in the Harbaugh era, several of the most "fuck"-heavy games were in fact wins. It's a very interesting phenomenon we will look at in more detail in December when this season is in the books. 

Anyway, there were 146 shits given during last night's game, which is actually the second-highest total for the season so far, just short of 149 for the Army game. The 42 damns given last night were also the second highest for the season to date. Interestingly, we used to mix up "fuck", "shit" and "damn" rather nicely, but the last 2.5 seasons of Harbaugh have led people to a mindset which apparently leads straight to "fuck". There were also 86 instances of "fire", and although some were directed at the usual suspects (none at Keyser Soze though), many of them were more about the "fire" that people wanted the team to show (and did in the second half). 

The one season high we did achieve was mentions of "Harbaugh" at 285, which beats out the previous high of 274 during the Illinois game. Much of the Harbaugh talk seems to tie into talk of Sha Patterson (180 mentions in last night's threads), and of course, the overall offensive and defensive performances. Those, in turn, lead up to the odd "fire" reference, so you can see that many of these words are connected on some level, and that's the point of doing this at all. That, and for me, this is a catharsis of sorts. 

So, across the three threads used for the data, we saw 2,769 posts, which all in all is the second highest total this season for open threads. The largest total goes again to the Army game, which was 3,122 posts across two threads. With 1,539 total instances of tracked words, we get an overall efficiency of 1.80, which is actually slightly down from Iowa and Illinois (both wins, of course), but slightly higher than Army (also a win). This is consistent with the phenomenon of "swearing efficiency" seeming to blur during the Harbaugh as well - stressful wins and particularly disappointing losses are beginning to look the same in the data. We'll talk about that too around the holidays, now that I believe there is enough data to talk about it. 

So, what does all this mean? Notre Dame should be interesting. The ND threads have always been interesting, if nothing else.