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

One of the burdens we endure as loyal, longtime fans of University Of Michigan football is that even our wins are somewhat taxing, and indeed, we showed a measureable amount of discontent this time around, especially in the first half when our offense could really find a rhythm other than one that Brian Eno might compose. 

First, let's look at the summary to date so you can mock my immense ability to procrastinate as I've not yet finished out the data for the "positive" words for a third straight week. 

In any case, we see here that the frontrunners are "fuck" and "Harbaugh", and fortunately no one has dared use them together save for the odd unsavory troll a few games back. This person is no longer among us. Rainbow Dash hoofed him right across the temple.

It is worth nothing that, even after three games, those three positive words are already 16% of the overall total of tracked instances. That alone should be evidence of a fanbase whose mindset on their own team has changed completely from this time last year, and that is a positive thing.

Here's thread size by game so far:

The lack of a dedicated live blog has increased participation in the threads, and we began to see that last year, but now that the live blog responsibilities rotate and traffic is limited by the strictures of Blyve's need to ultimately make money, you really see it this year. There is also a renewed interest in this team and a lot of newbies are gravitating towards the open threads. After five games, average combine thread size is 2,110 posts, which is a good 25% better than last year during the same period. 

The relative distribution of the "original six" across the first five games:

Because it is in reality a massive chart, this one might be hard to read. What I really wanted to point out here is that we reached a season high for "suck" so far, much of it directed at Jake Rudock and the offense, but in this game in particular, a note problem with run blocking.

Maybe we give Randy Edsall some credit for figuring something out, for at least he knew about the game even if he didn't realize there was a meeting, or perhaps it is just what we assumed - a work in progress. Either way, much of our "suck" in the open threads revolved around that. A good deal of our "fuck too actually, although the referees took on their fair share of "fuck" from our audience. You don't need to be familiar with EVERY rule or know what the fair catch signal looks like to be a ref in the Big Ten, right?

You won't see it here, but "Morris" snuck back into our conversation too - mainly people wondering how bad he must be to have not seen the field by now. 

Here's efficiency and tracked words:

Despite Maryland being rather stressful - it now accounts for almost one-quarter of all the tracked words this season so far - you can see that overall efficiency remained mostly flat. We did, after all, win - that usually helps. Adjusted for the "original six", the efficiency is 8.13, which has historically been typical for wins around here. 

Here's the Mood Chart - still fiddling with labels for the quadrants. The Harbaugh era makes this difficult to pin down because it is new to us. No, I should say it has been so long for us - revisiting these feelings is a process.