The State Of Our Open Threads - After Wisconsin

First, let me just open with this - I am actually a bit disappointed that so many people gave up on the open thread at halftime or thereabouts, for yesterday's thread was on pace to bury the fucking needle on a few of the words we normally track in this series. As it stood, there were over 1,800 posts at halftime, but just short of 2,300 at the end of the game, so many of you probably went on to other things. Perhaps that meant mowing the lawn, or finishing that home project you've been neglecting, or perhaps it meant that you were already blackout drunk. In any case, the numbers probably do not capture the extent of the vitriol, but then in the 2nd half, that vitriol wasn't being expressed here. I admit that I casually surfed other games during the second half, for precious little that I cared to see was happening in mine. 

All that said, we do have a duty to examine just how upset we were at a 1st year game being played in the 5th year of a coaching era, if you will, and that is what we will do. 

There were only 335 fucks given in the open thread this week, which is way down from the Army game's 546 fucks, and that is a game we won, albeit far less than handily. Far less. I am sure we could have gotten many more fucks if people had not turned away from their computers or phones for the second half. Indeed, I am sure some of us said more than that out loud regardless of where we happened to be sitting, but when two weeks of preparation looks like a wet fart, that's what happens.

We only gave 129 shits, which is also down from the Army total. Again, I am sure we could have achieved so much more had folks not made the utterly sensible decision to find something relaxing to do in the second half, like shave their netherregions with a butterknife or, as I did, make inquiries into the possibility of freebasing wine. By the time the second half started, very few people were around to give a shit, so the depressed totals are what they are.

Also of note are the 73 instances of "fire", nearly all of which were directed at Gattis, Brown and of course Harbaugh. Some people wanted it to happen right now, others at the end of the season depending on who it was and the situation in the game. This is where I breathe a sigh of relief that no one here that I am aware of is in HR at a large corporation. That isn't to say that I am not upset at poor coaching, but merely to point out that if such decisions were made irrationally and in the moment all the time, well, let's just say that my dishwashing stint in college would have lasted far less than the week that it did. 

"Suck" came up only 68 times, and I say "only" because I would have thought this would be where a lot of people would go with this game because we did suck in this one. Then again, I could be missing something - "fuck" might also mean "suck" to some, and indeed, some thought we did "fucking suck", so there is also this. 

"Harbaugh" and "defense" were significant headlines in the thread too, appearing 264 and 150 times respectively. Of course, much of it was negative. In summary, if you don't want Harbaugh fired, you want his seat to be warm, and our run defense in particular leaves much to be desired. That was where much of that discussion went. "Speed in space" only came up 20 times. It is, after all, difficult to discuss something when it is merely a broad and formless theory. 

So, yeah, Rutgers should be fun. I hear tickets are being sold for half-eaten sandwiches at this point.