So, even though the audience for this little feature is basically an obscure band of football sickos such as myself that also have a morbid curiosity about fan behavior, "The State Of Our Open Threads" is returning this season as usual. 

A few little notes - graphs will make a reappearance after a couple games of data. I really didn't know how I wanted to do that portion of it with this iteration of the blog, so I didn't despite stockpiling data all that time and that's my fault for not making it nearly as pretty as it could be. We're going to show you the trends yet again. Also, there probably is enough data now - nine years of it - to do a decent "History Of Fuck" feature this fall. I actually did most of the preliminary data breakdowns over the summer, but I just need to get the inspiration to write it. Perhaps after the first rather disappointing game, eh? 

In any case, there are a few little things to mention regarding the WMU open thread - we did manage a reasonably healthy 131 fucks, although for context, about half of these came at the moment of Bell's injury. I was at the game and contributed multiple fucks to the verbal foray myself, just as most of the people around me did. The worst part was that it came not too long after what was undoubtedly the lock for best offensive play of the week....that was ruined by a shit call. Maybe there's a metric there, although measuring that for even one game officiated by O'Neill's crew would keep us here for ages. 

There were 66 shits given, and again, about half of them came around the Bell injury. I am almost positive the one I gave came at halftime, and not in my seat fortunately, and it wasn't related to the quality of play so much as the rather generous portion of salad that I had before the game. Yes, I am old and have problems that make me wary of stadium food...and tailgate food now too. In any event, like "fucks", beyond one rather unfortunate injury, it was a fairly quiet game, as many openers have been. 

The defense came up a lot as well - 87 mentions, to be precise. I thought about this as I was sitting there yesterday too, because I am sure it looked as spongy in the beginning in Ann Arbor as it did wherever you were watching. That said, it tightened up some later, but needless to say, we are concerned about it after one game if the data is accurate. The offense wasn't nearly as problematic, per the thread, and that's more or less on par with my own thoughts and people that I talked to afterwards, many of whom - like me - were still in awe of the rope McCarthy threw. That was Drew Henson level "something out of nothing" shit, IMHO.

Did anyone want to see heads roll? Not as such, not yet anyway. Merely 26 mentions of "fire", and virtually all of them were in reference to how "fired up" Harbaugh seemed. There were a few light-hearted instances, but nothing serious. I am sure those will come later because, at this point, the uptick is predictable right down to the opponent even. More on that phenomenon later, I would think. 

Overall, we saw 510 instances of tracked language across 1,363 posts - the lower number of posts, for those who don't keep track of these things, is common with most home games, especially early, as many of us are....not in front of this site. There's no way you can be reliably if you are at the stadium. I've tried. We all have, I am sure. Anyway, that relates to an efficiency of 2.67 for the thread (total posts / tracked words), and that number relates to a typical non-descript Harbaugh-era win, which this basically was. 

I think this will get interesting quickly, because we get to face a rather humiliated Washington team now.