The State Of Our Open Threads - After Minnesota (COVID Edition)

Well, for all the noise and unusual hum of the 2020 season - from pondering if there would be one at all to pondering who we might play and whether or not we would actually get to play them given the uncertainty of everything - we did in fact play a game last night and it was, from the standpoint of the open thread, a relatively quiet and comfortable one for us. 

Of course, there is not much to go over, and indeed there may not be a whole lot to go over this season barring some random catastrophe or a loss to Ohio State, both of which are staples in recent Michigan football lore. Anyway, there were a few somewhat telling numbers in the game and I shall report out on them. 

In the entire thread - all 1,339 posts of it - we only gave 86 fucks, which made for a quiet evening compared to Minnesota games or indeed most other games in the past. I would think that many people were just happy to have a Michigan game on television and perhaps stayed away from the thread. We tend to give more fucks and have far larger threads during away games, but it has been an odd year overall. We only gave 40 shits as well, which is far below the average of past seasons, although like "fuck", COVID season or not, we're only one game in and I am confident that we can outdo ourselves yet. 

There were a few tense moments, mainly in the first half, where many of the 23 references to firing someone occurred. Most of those were calling for Don Brown's head, which is surely jumping the gun as we normally only do this in the last 2-3 weeks of the season. That does rather match with the 109 references to the defense or something about it, however, and I would agree that we've got some things to do on that side of the ball, although at this point, they are far better served by not firing Don Brown. We'll save THAT for Ohio State, right?

I was rather disappointed by the only 22 instances of "Joe" - I switched from "Shea" to "Joe" for QB name tracking and while on Twitter, we couldn't stop talking about Joe Milton, there wasn't as much stated enthusiasm in the thread. I am sure there was plenty that didn't show up there - that is one of the shortcomings of the method here. If only I could get about 50 of us in a room and use a live recording....wait, NO DON'T DO THAT.

What did it all look like in the end? Well, if it looked like my end....OK, TMI. Anyway, there were 475 tracked words across 1,339 posts, which translates to a "swearing efficiency" (even though not all of the words are swear words - that's the name I gave the ratio) of 2.82. Historically, that number is in the "comfortable" range of victories, so overall, there was not much worry throughout the game, even if the first five minutes had some brutal moments.