The State Of Our Open Threads: After Maryland

For the third week in a row, we are going to dissect what was a very low-stress affair for Michigan fans who took part in our open threads, but I like to believe that these are equally important to examine because it gives us some interesting contrast to games which, shall we say, provide a plethora of fucks. 

Anyway, we nearly did something we hadn't done in a while - not break 100 fucks in a game. Against Maryland, we produced 101 fucks, and to illustrate how low-stress this game was for us, the word "nice" actually outpaced "fuck" for much of the game. It was only when the defense seemed to get a bit soft late in the game and around the time of Maryland's TD that the word "fuck" got a decent push.

While we're on that subject, "suck" got a nice bump around the same point in the game as people lamented the safeties in particular, but also a few other things. Indeed, "suck" is the only word which saw a marked increase in usage as most everything else either hovered near previous levels or fell. For example, this game produced the fewest shits yet this year ar 46, the fewest damns at 22 and indeed 101 comes in as the fewest fucks. 

How quiet has it been? From Rutgers to now, we've seen 341 fucks given in all those threads, which does not yet beat the total for the Penn State game, which was 560. We really have enjoyed a nice stretch. Even so, the Maryland game was fairly "fuck" driven, relatively speaking: 

Overall efficiency stayed relatively stable - 3.62 versus 3.87 from the Minnesota game, which in the Harbaugh era is usually indicative of a comfortable win. That is measured across 1,513 total posts in two threads and across 418 total tracked instances. Actually, the profile of this game was nearly identical to Minnesota. 

I resurrected the Normalized Values graph to show you just how easy we've had it these last few weeks as opposed to where the previous four weeks before that had us. The Purdue to Penn State stretch was.....yeah, I drank a lot too.

Of course, all this will likely change next week - I don't expect Wisconsin to be quite so low-stress.