The State Of Our Open Threads: After Rutgers...
Although we'll share the data all the same, for the first time this season, we are faced with the problem of not really having too much to report in a given week for this feature. There are a few things which contribute to this, of course:
- It was Rutgers
- This time, there was no second half thread, which curtailed comment volume
- It was a home game, which means many of us were there
There are other issues, of course, and this certainly isn't the first time it has happened.
Anyway, there were only 109 fucks given in the open thread for this game, which is a season low, and 65 shits given, which is also a season low. Certainly not shocking at all given the opponent, and it was probably a welcome respite for many coming off what this study shows to be the most consistently stressful stretch of the Harbaugh era so far. One or two people, weirdly enough, carried their "fire" into this week, with one directed at Harbaugh and a couple directed at Hamilton and Drevno, although all these appeared before Peters came in the game.
The one significant jump in anything was down in the positive words that get tracked - the word "nice", which we had largely abandoned over the last month, made a resurgence with the appearance of Brandon Peters. As a fan, I can say that although it was Rutgers and as opponents collect data on him, he will face some adversity and may not look quite that crisp sometimes, it was a, well, nice sight.
Here's what the Stress Chart looked like:
As you can see, nothing too noteworthy. "Fuck" declines rapidly after Peters comes in (OK, that sounds bad), and the "Harbaugh" talk spikes somewhere in the middle of the game, mostly people wondering where the hell this performance was all year.
Indeed, there were no particular standout correlations here - R-squared for "fuck" was only 0.433 in fact, which would be highly unusual for a Michigan football game. Overall swearing efficiency was down at 3.15, which is calculated using 532 total tracked instance of words against 1,677 posts, and in the Harbaugh era, that number translates to a comfortable win, which it obviously was.
PREVIEW:
At the end of the season, you'll get a 60-game history of "Fuck" in the open threads which will attempt to find some predictability in the blog's use of "fuck" as an expression of our feelings. So far, in collecting preliminary data, we see that we definitely don't like close losses:
October 29th, 2017 at 10:32 AM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 10:39 AM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 12:29 PM ^
I don't have a lot of data on it, but in the Harbaugh era, I have been actually getting into X fucks per Y number of minutes and even last year rolled out the FART rate, which measures the word adjusted for in-game time. It would be interesting to at least get within a couple minutes of significant events to see if there is clustering - I bet there is actually.
October 29th, 2017 at 10:45 AM ^
I think the only occurrence was when we were to the 4th quarter and only 2 hours had passed. They interrupted the game more at that point to stretch it to 3 hours, but the game was under control by then so it wasn’t nearly as annoying.
October 29th, 2017 at 10:52 AM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 12:54 PM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 10:57 AM ^
that some of those "fucks" were half of "Fuck Yeah!"s
October 29th, 2017 at 11:19 AM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 1:05 PM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 11:20 AM ^
there wasn't as many fucks after the appearance of our Peters?
October 29th, 2017 at 11:35 AM ^
With saying things along the lines of "What the F is Harbaugh thinking with O'Korn"
October 29th, 2017 at 12:09 PM ^
is much improved now that we have a qb
October 29th, 2017 at 1:03 PM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 1:12 PM ^
October 29th, 2017 at 8:26 PM ^
Thanks!
GO BLUE!!