The State Of Our Open Threads - After Maryland

Well, what a difference a week makes.

Last week, as you'll recall, Northwestern gave us fits in the open threads - 263 fucks, 132 shits, 31 damns, 51 instances of "suck" thrown at the team. All in all, par for the course in stressful road wins, especially sloppy ones that require a comeback.

So, Maryland was a very quiet game for the board by comparison - actually, there were only 1,181 posts in total. It was a home game, which lowers participation, but it was also a game with a weather delay at the front of it, and the thread was up nearly two hours before game time as a result. By the time it actually started, a lot of people who might otherwise participate probably stuck to the game. 

Indeed, only 108 fucks were given yesterday, many of them aimed at Maryland's rather underhanded play and attempts to take players out. Some were also given during the first couple offensive drives and during Maryland's special teams TD. The story is similar for the 55 shits, although some of those - roughly half, in fact - were centered around injuries as well as the same things the fucks were focused on. 

Notable decreases also include the 7 instances of "fire", down from 22 at Northwestern and the mere 9 instances of "suck", down from 51 for the Northwestern game. The message here is that when your team has to come back from 17-0 on the road, they suck, but when they dominate for much of the game, they don't suck so much. We're talking about the same team in each case, of course, but such is the life of the reactionary fan. 

The 89 instances of "offense" or words related to the offense were actually up from last week, albeit slightly. The sole difference is that whereas last week the references had a decidedly negative connotation, the talk was much more mixed - negative turning to positive - as the Maryland game went on. 

Overall efficiency is actually a bit misleading, I believe, with this week's data due to the reduced participation. The quotient was 2.81, which is more consistent with stressful wins in the Harbaugh era, but this one didn't feel like that at all, at least in my own opinion.

Some stats at the halfway mark - 

 - 925 fucks given, or about 154 per game on average

 - 501 shits given, or about 84 per game on average

 - We suck an average of 32 times per game

 - We talk about Harbaugh about 51 times each game

 - About 17 times per game, someone wants someone else fired

Totally functional fanbase indeed. 

Now, we get Wisconsin. Those numbers should be fun.