The State Of Our Open Threads: After Rutgers

Well, apart from the first couple plays of yesterday's game, it was mostly smooth sailing, no? Of course, this is Michigan and none of us will ever truly believe perhaps that there is a game in which there weren't quite so many ominous issues, but all the same, apart from the initial freakout, it was a fairly easy afternoon of football in Ann Arbor. Well, that's my opinion anyway. 

Even in the open thread for yesterday's game, things weren't too upsetting, at least relatively speaking. Consider, for example, that during last year's Rutgers game, we gave 224 fucks, whereas yesterday, we gave a mere 97 fucks. Further, 77 shits were given at last year's game in Piscataway, compared to only 55 shits given yesterday.

Of course, the normal qualifiers apply - open threads tend to get lesser participation when the game is in Ann Arbor because more of us are at the Stadium and letting our dissatisfaction fly wildly into the ether, not onto the Internet where it clearly belongs. Also, rule changes seem to have affected the results a bit in that there is less to comment on overall. 

Anyway, back to yesterday - overall, it was, with some variations here and there, similar to the Bowling Green game in terms of the overall vitriol posted online, that level being perhaps well described as "not much, but some". Clearly, there are concerns - there were 39 instances of "fire", although a good portion of that was directed at the officials, who seems to be at another game. There were also 18 instances of "suck", mostly in the first half, the latest in a string of famously flat first halves from which we typically recover nicely even if many fans forget this in the moment. 

Let's look at mentions of "offense" versus mentions of its primary driver:

 

This one is interesting - the offense has been talked about with what can be described as an increasing urgency, and with it talk of McCarthy, particularly in the shaky Bowling Green performance which caused many of us to momentarily lose our sanity. Yesterday, as JJ seemed to find himself again slowly but surely, that talk faded some. It was replaced by things like our somewhat quizzical OL personnel choices and the somewhat lagging performance of Donovan Edwards, but we took a step back from the JJ talk. For a week.

"Defense" versus "Offense" is a measure of overall concern with scheme / alignment / coaching / etc...on both sides of the ball. Normally, they almost match each other early on in the season, then one will start to slowly overwhelm the other as the season wears on (last year, "offense" clearly took over by the Penn State game). So far this year, we have:

"Offense" clearly bugs us just a bit more early on.

Let's take a look at one more - the normalized values for select words. This is usually a good measure of how we felt about a game:

That's more or less what you would expect - the first two games were easy on the eyes, then the final non-conference game passes with some uneasiness, then Rutgers, which we win, but now we're on edge with eight games left. 

Oh well. Nebraska is up next. I am sure you are as excited to dabble in the Big Ten West as I am.