The State Of Our Open Threads (Game Eleven, Year One, Era Of Harbaugh): After Penn State

Well, we needed that game to stay on our path to a potential spot in the BTCG, and we definitely held up our end of the bargain. Of course, the very next game on ABC was supremely #B1G and our rival in Columbus could have helped us out a bit and made our game against them next week a little more meaningful. Oh, if only, but alas, Michael Geiger's leg and an inexplicably bad game plan on the part of Ohio State combined for an upset.

Regarding our game specifically, however, we faced the need to win, the need for others to win and the general battle with suddenly elevated expectations and it led to some stress. Throw in the ongoing frustration with pre-snap penalties and Big Ten officiating and establishing a consistent run game deep in the conference schedule, you can see how even a 28-16 win will cause Michigan fans to occasionally reach for a "fuck" here and there. 

In fact, we gave 519 fucks in this game - that's the third highest total this year, behind Indiana (a game which we pulled out of our...well....) and MSU (let's not discuss that). It was followed by the season high for "shit" - 201 of those, to be exact. The second-highest total of "damn" happened yesterday too - 105 of those. We definitely did not have complete joy at several points. 

Here's the summary to date:

It should be noted now that at a point early on in the season, "Harbaugh" and "fuck" were very close in terms of their gross total in this measure, but as we've walked through the conference schedule in particular, "fuck" has taken its traditional place as the go-to profane word in our open threads for games. 

Of course, they are not all bad - "fuck" came on a lot of good efforts as well, and as we pulled away, "fuck" was embedded in some very complimentary statements about Rudock and a couple other players. It was also attached to false starts, that PI call on Peppers, the normal incidents of awful officiating we've come to expect in the Big Ten and other moments. 

Efficiency and pecent of total look like this:

I'll mention it now - this was the year's largest thread to date at 3,669 posts, eclipsing the Indiana thread by 59 posts. Again, limited availability of liveblogs and the fact that this was an away game add to increased participation in the open threads. This game also accounts for the second largest segment of total "incidents" of tracked words at 13.99%, right behind Indiana (14.83%). Overall efficiency was 2.29, but adjusted for the Original Six, it falls to 4.04, which has been historically consistent with stressful wins and some losses as well. 

Here's how the Original Six are trending overall:

The last several weeks have proably shave uncounted years off of our collective lives - I am probably down a year now all by myself, and yes, there has been beer involved in this, sometimes something stronger. Calmer than last week....just. Definitely not by much.

The Mood Chart:

Again, life got in the way of me doing a lot of work on this, but finally I have a short week and a holiday, so I shall probably have a better way to describe this in Harbaugh Era terms next week. What it is indicating is that we're pretty active and we've been into the action though.