The State Of Our Open Threads: After Penn State

So, about the past week.....*crowd starts throwing things in direction of stage*

OK, fine, you know what's gone on, and certainly, it could not have been at a more interesting moment in the schedule. Indeed, the hideous climax - our chickenshit conference commissioner first leaking the decision on Harbaugh to ESPN, a full half hour before telling the University - will forever be ingrained in our memories as unforgiveable disrespect, as it should be. 

We're fans, alumni / alumnae, and we were pissed. We could only imagine how pissed the team was, but they were in Happy Valley to take care of a little business and they did that, even going as far as to just stop throwing altogether for 2.5 quarters in a show of disdain for Penn State, one of the most vocal crybabies in this affair, and all that has happened. 

However, this exercise is confined to our feelings, and we had a lot of them. We will start with this:

For perspective, the average thread size for the season before yesterday was 1,522 posts - yesterday's thread, as of the moment the clock hit zero, was 3,438 posts. The total number of instances across all game threads until yesterday was 4,777, which makes for a game average of about 530 instances per thread. Yesterday, there were 1,464 instances of tracked words marked, which is now 23.46% of the entire season total to date. In other words, almost 1/4 of total participation in this season's numbers is from yesterday's game. 

Interestingly, overall efficiency was down slightly from Purdue (2.26 for that game, 2.35 yesterday), but not significantly, which is amazing given the bloated thread size, rivaled perhaps only by OSU / MSU threads long forgotten (except by this study). That is in the normal range for a win where we were excitable, if you will. 

Speaking of us being excitable, let's talk about fucks given: 

The precise number of fucks given yesterday was 475 - some of you may have given some offline. I did certainly. This obliterates the previous season high, which was 158 for the Purdue game, and indeed, yesterday's total moves the season average from 85 to 122 by itself. It was a lot of fucks, but we had a lot of occasion to use that word. The usage varied from discontent with the conference, to Tony Petitti personally, to the refs, to the strategic abandonment of passing, plus several more. The larger point is that emotions were high among the fanbase as well, and it certainly showed. 

We will not forget shits, of course - those of us who had the odd lunch at Panchero's back in the day certainly can't forget those, but we did give a season high of these as well at 108, with the previous high being 79 versus Indiana. Yesterday's productivity here was enough to move the average from 43 to 50, which is somewhat impressive as well. 

The mammoth numbers yesterday also, of course, change this:

These, of course, show the performance of certain words against their mean usage, so now, we basically have the rest of the schedule and then Penn State. Bumps here and there because college football is stupid and weird and we love it, but then Penn State. This is only the conference schedule, but even if you include that, there is all this relative serenity save for momentary wobbles.....and then Penn State. Our first test indeed, and I dare say we passed it just in time for the national media to move the goalposts, but then this is what they do and will do repeatedly from here on out. 

Let's take a closer look at what is turning out to be an interesting balance this year:

We talk slightly more about defense still, on the whole. We did yesterday - 160 mentions of "defense" to 143 for "offense". We talk about the defense more, of course, because this defense is stingy to the point of being mean about it, and that's what I think we would want. The offense yesterday, at least the talk about it, was largely about the hilarious disrespect of Penn State's run defense. It has been like this all year, but I think that - this year perhaps a little more than others - we had a decent idea of what this team would be. There have been years where clearly they have figured it out on the go, and it shows in our numbers too. 

A few other notes - the absence of Harbaugh also pushed us to a season-high number of mentions of "Harbaugh" (170), along with "fire" (49) and "suck" (40), although the last two are more a function of thread size than any discontent. A few people wanted James Franklin sacked actually. Coming from the Michigan side, I chuckled at it, but if I were a PSU fan, I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to see the back of "Big Game Frames", as someone on Twitter called him. 

So, we have two things coming up this week - a hearing on what should now be a preliminary injunction against the Big Ten, and then Maryland. I think we'll just stick with the open thread for Maryland, if that is OK with everyone.