The State Of Our Open Threads: After Utah (Game One, Year One, Era Of Harbaugh)

Submitted by LSAClassOf2000 on

For comparison purposes, mainly due to the change in staff and the hope for a corresponding change in outlook for the board, I have decided to go on with this feature. I know some people grew weary of it last year, a few people offline saying that I shouldn't make fun of the board and things like that. See how well I  listen, right?

Anyway, some of the changes  - we will be tracking instances of "Harbaugh" because obviously, but also "Peppers", "Butt", "Morris" and other key words as well as the usual profanities, so it isn't all bad news in these numbers. If you've got suggestions, do let me know. This time around, as there is no in-season comparisons based on one data point, you just get a summary of the totals this time, so apologies to those who were expecting something visual.

Since this game was being played under a different staff, it's hard to make direct comparison to last year's Utah thread, but to review the summary totals, last year's thread was 2,422 posts overall with 501 instances of tracked words (and those were different too. This translated to an overall efficiency of 4.83. Typically, even if it is a loss, home games lead to lower participation. This years, the thread was 1,413 posts with 563 instances of tracked words (due to chananges mentioned above), which led to an efficiency of 2.63.

It is important to mention now that in those 563 instances, only 238 relate to the original words tracked by this method, so if you want ti nitpick, the adjusted efficiency is 5.94, which is pretty typical for a Michigan game. In those original words, 120 of the 238 were "fuck" with the next largest total being the 40 instances of "damn". "Fuck" ballooned from 28 to 92 between halves, whereas most everything else remained at a constant hum. 

The most mentioned word among those tracked - I bet you can't guess. Yeah, Harbaugh. 143 mentions of Harbaugh, which beat any word including the profane ones. Peppers managed 53 mentions and Butt took in 62 posts about "Butt". I left "Morris" as a tracked word, but only 40 mentions of Morris took place overall despite the axiom of "the most popular player is the backup QB" holding true on the board for much of the evening. 

So, there's the basic rundown - one game, so not much to tell for the time being. It will be fun to see how this changes compared to last year, however, or at least I believe so. 

 

Caesar

September 4th, 2015 at 9:05 AM ^

Great stuff, thanks for the tabulation.

Let us say that someone drops a Baltimore-styled profanity, with elongated vowels, etc. Will that get missed or are you doing some sort of manual count to check on things? 

LSAClassOf2000

September 4th, 2015 at 9:54 AM ^

For some words in particular, I have to do the manual count because people also have swearing in their tag lines, so as a result, it's actually kind of easy to pick up regional variants (if people in fact type them as they sound, rather than the word itself) along the way. Those normally get included actually. Indeed, in a thread last year, cussing in a foreign language (it was French, which I actually can read) counted too. 

Marley Nowell

September 4th, 2015 at 9:16 AM ^

These Utah games have all been landmark games for the Michigan football program. 2008 Utah was RR's first game ; 2014 Utah game was clearly the last straw for DB & Co. ; and now 2015 Utah is the start of the Harbaugh era

MikeCohodes

September 4th, 2015 at 9:33 AM ^

I'd be curious if you tracked Hoke still, to see how many comments of the "Thank God this game wasn't coached by Hoke or we would've been destroyed" variety appeared in the thread.

Mannix

September 4th, 2015 at 9:41 AM ^

I think "Hoke" should be added to the profanity lexicon. I did see comments such as "Is H*** still coaching this team?" and "I swear there's no difference", as well as a ton of "Thanks, H***, for leaving no QB's!"




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LSAClassOf2000

September 4th, 2015 at 9:50 AM ^

Traditionally, this has just been the MGoBoard as it provides some of the most creative and "colorful" commentaries on games. People have also asked about the liveblog and perhaps tracking that too - the analytics suite on Blyve is sort of pricey, but it would provide all the information I would need actually. Of course, that would probably rope me into hosting the liveblog which.....yeah, I will leave that to others. 

samdrussBLUE

September 4th, 2015 at 9:49 AM ^

Looks like this didn't include the open thread on the main page. Also another signal that thread should have never existed. Can we officially make the open thread created by the board, for the board?




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Jon06

September 4th, 2015 at 10:30 AM ^

I liked this series last year because we needed some comic relief. This year I am not sure. It could be good if the tone is right: we are on the upswing, so let's act like it, both in the threads themselves and in these updates.

T

September 4th, 2015 at 10:42 AM ^

How many instances of "fire?"  Just curious.  Some people will never be happy no matter what.  Many of them root for Michigan.

LSAClassOf2000

September 4th, 2015 at 11:16 AM ^

I don't have the speadsheet on the machine I am at right now, but it was less than ten and none were calls for Harbaugh obviously. A majority of them were people who wanted to see Al Borges fired...again...still, even though clearly these drives - INTs aside - were much too coherent to have been concocted by Borges really. 

MgoTango

September 4th, 2015 at 12:13 PM ^

Not just the counts, but the trend analysis as well (how things change as the game changes).

I'm looking forward to word counts in the future where words like "touchdown" get most of the points, and words like "turnover" and "interception" do not. I know those days are coming! I wonder if you got many counts for "Rome"... as in "wasn't built in a day".

Thanks for tracking these.