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

We are a bit late with this feature today as I had to make a cider and donuts run to Parmenter's this morning and the line was, well, it revived images of the opening of the first McDonald's in Moscow, where people stood in line for what seemed like days for a Big Mac.

Before I start, I will say that I know some people won't want to revisit all this, but this is my version of catharsis in these situations. It's also helping me ignore the Lions collapsing right now. 

Anyway, let's start this with something of note - we came within 11 "fucks" of tying the all-time record for fucks since the beginning of this little experiment. The record - as I mentioned a few weeks ago - was 571 fucks and that was the infamous "27 for 27" game at Penn State. We managed 560 fucks, which is 42% of the season total to date.

The overall summary is below:

Consistent with the overall strategy over the last few years, "fuck" is the go-to word when the MGoBoard sits down to watch a Michigan game. When did we fuck? At key moments, of course, we clustered our fucks. Those included

- targeting call on Bolden

- when MSU's TB was totally forgotten about

- the triple-review TD cliffhanger

- a certain fumbled snap

A fair number of them were directed at the officials, of course, as were a majority of the "fire" mentions in this game. "Shit" came with "horeshit", which was an apt description of just about every call of consequence in that game, but many of them were centered around the trageting call and any time Cook found Burbridge.

I want everyone to see this one next. Here's efficiency vs. percent of total instances:

By a significant margin, 2.18 is the highest rating this year so far. The next highest is 2.55 for the Northwestern game, which we won, of course. Adjusted for the Original Six words, efficiency drops to 3.11, consistent with a mildly irritating close loss over the years, so there is that. What is notable here is that one game now constitutes 23.62% of all instances tracked this year. Far and away, that was the most stressed we've been and none of should be shocked by it. 

Here's the bar graph of the Original Six:

Yeah, basically what I said above. There were 25 instances of "fire" thrown in, mostly in hopes that the Big Ten would relieve the officials of their duties....or worse things involving "fire" in one or two cases. "Damn" even slightly outpaced the previous "damn rate" - it was an emotional afternoon / evening all around. 

It wasn't all bad, of course - "Peppers" hit a record number of mentions at 99, many of them clustered around his long-anticipated use on offense. Even words like "great" and "awesome" were thrown in there in non-sarcastic moments where - all things considered - we were doing rather well. 

As for the Mood Chart:

This looks right to me - we were definitely frustrated, but when compared to last season, this one has been overall much kinder to us on this plot.