The State Of Our Open Threads: After Northwestern

First, let's face it - many of us, myself among them, would like to do one thing to last night:

That said, however, we did win, however stressful and unfulfilling it was, and we do have some data to look at here.

The comparisons between this game and the data for Notre Dame are pretty interesting. The sole major difference is that we won a stinker rather than lost a stinker, but past history bears out that these sorts of games tend to produce similar results. For example:

- Notre Dame produced 272 fucks, compared to 263 for Northwestern

- Notre Dame produced 121 shits, slightly less than 132 from last night

- 70 specific mentions of Harbaugh in the Notre Dame game, and 77 last night. In both cases, few of them were flattering. 

We hit a few season highs last night as well:

 - 51 mentions of "suck", which it did for a good long time. 

 - 104 posts referencing the defense, a majority of them tied to the words "suck" and "shit"

Interestingly, the two games with the most "suck" are two games that we in fact won - SMU and now Northwestern, so while more study is warranted, there could be a correlation between our sucking and our winning in a less than thrilling fashion. That said, there are plenty of programs who make their money winning in less than thrilling ways that probably also "suck", but alas, that's beyond the scope of this work. 

Overall efficiency was consistent with "stress-inducing wins" at 2.64, which comes from the 812 tracked instances of words across two threads totalling 2,147 posts. That's the second-highest post total after Notre Dame, which is consistent with the fact that these threads tend to be larger for road games, and of course, our road troubles tend to inflate the numbers on occasion. That said, the "Swearing Efficiency", as it is kind of known, is less for Notre Dame, which makes me wonder if a lot of people simply quit watching / contributing in that game. It would be interesting to know, and we've seen threads in the past almost die out in games like that before. 

So, we'll see what Maryland brings.