The State Of Our Open Threads: After Rutgers...

Although we'll share the data all the same, for the first time this season, we are faced with the problem of not really having too much to report in a given week for this feature. There are a few things which contribute to this, of course:

- It was Rutgers

- This time, there was no second half thread, which curtailed comment volume

- It was a home game, which means many of us were there

There are other issues, of course, and this certainly isn't the first time it has happened.

Anyway, there were only 109 fucks given in the open thread for this game, which is a season low, and 65 shits given, which is also a season low. Certainly not shocking at all given the opponent, and it was probably a welcome respite for many coming off what this study shows to be the most consistently stressful stretch of the Harbaugh era so far. One or two people, weirdly enough, carried their "fire" into this week, with one directed at Harbaugh and a couple directed at Hamilton and Drevno, although all these appeared before Peters came in the game.

The one significant jump in anything was down in the positive words that get tracked - the word "nice", which we had largely abandoned over the last month, made a resurgence with the appearance of Brandon Peters. As a fan, I can say that although it was Rutgers and as opponents collect data on him, he will face some adversity and may not look quite that crisp sometimes, it was a, well, nice sight. 

Here's what the Stress Chart looked like:

As you can see, nothing too noteworthy. "Fuck" declines rapidly after Peters comes in (OK, that sounds bad), and the "Harbaugh" talk spikes somewhere in the middle of the game, mostly people wondering where the hell this performance was all year. 

Indeed, there were no particular standout correlations here - R-squared for "fuck" was only 0.433 in fact, which would be highly unusual for a Michigan football game. Overall swearing efficiency was down at 3.15, which is calculated using 532 total tracked instance of words against 1,677 posts, and in the Harbaugh era, that number translates to a comfortable win, which it obviously was. 

PREVIEW:

At the end of the season, you'll get a 60-game history of "Fuck" in the open threads which will attempt to find some predictability in the blog's use of "fuck" as an expression of our feelings. So far, in collecting preliminary data, we see that we definitely don't like close losses: