The State Of Our Open Threads: After Purdue

First and foremost, let me say that if you had the same experience that I did yesterday, then the first half alone killed a six pack. There was a lot of stress from about 4 PM to 7:30 PM, needless to say. 

So, let's take a look at the data on this one, eh? I know, some of you are SO thrilled.

The unofficial count is probably far more, but this game saw the blog give 421 fucks, which actually does not crack the top ten in the four seasons that I've been doing this now. It is the most fucks we've given about a game this season, however. It doesn't stop there, of course - we also gave the most shits (154), the most damns (85), and interestingly, we also topped the season highs for "fire" and "suck" with 51 and 96 instances respecitvely. In other words, in this game more than any in the Harbaugh era in fact, people wanted someone to get fired and there was more hand-wringing about how much we suck. 

The offense was also foremost in our minds to the tune of 318 mentions, and for the third week in a row, we talked about it in an unflattering way....until the 2nd half of this game, when the context began to change drastically in posts. 

Of course, this is Michigan, all of us are fans and many of us are students and alums, and it is a familiar cycle for us going back years - we want someone fired, we lament that we suck, and somehow we win anyway more often than not. When the win grades out much like that paper in Anthropology 330 (or whichever class you can insert here) that you were not exactly proud of but could live with because it didn't really hurt any objective, you have experienced the Michigan Difference as a fan and a student.

Also of note, there were 3,151 posts generated across two threads, which is actually one of the largest threads collectively that we've ever had, topped only by a 2013 Penn State, 2016 Ohio State and a few others - a common theme in the largest threads is that they were devestating losses, so this game is something of an outlier in that group. 

Overall, we managed 1,388 total tracked words across 3,151 posts, which makes for an overall "swearing efficiency" of 2.27, a number which - like the 2.47 for the Air Force game - is usually prevalent among losses in this analysis, so it was another win that left a lot of Michigan fans here with questions and left us a bit wanting. 

The Stress Chart was a weird one:

Each page of replies repreresents roughly 6 minutes of game play or 20 or so minutes of airtime. You can see that "fuck" is rather decoupled from the total trend, and in fact, R-squared for "fuck" here is only 0.553. We threw such a variety of words out there this time that we finally created a situation where the relative "fuck" didn't tell the whole story for us. The Speight injury factors heavily into the first couple pages with respect to "fuck", and you can see a similar set of points for "offense" - one for the injury, and then later on in the game when the offense seemed to find something similar to a groove.

We'll pick this back up in two weeks with Michigan State - that should be an interesting one as usual for this analysis.