We saw a little glimmer of how the blog handles its adversity during the first half of the Colorado game when things did not go all that well, needless to say, but yesterday in a game against a conference opponent with a legitimate defense, a game that some strangely thought we could dance through, we received an interesting insight into game-long adversity.
Despite winning, we managed to do something that we haven't done in all the time I have been doing this - nearly literally doubled the fucks.
In the first four games, we managed to accumulate 487 fucks, and in three hours of old school Big Ten drudgery, we accumulated 422 fucks. If there's a headline from the game that applies to this little feature, it is definitely that. Although we tacked on a 25% increase in shit and a nearly 50% increase in "damn" in just one game, the totall fucks were something to behold. Now, granted it was concentrated around one phase of the game which came pre-imploded this time around, as well as the Newsome injury and a couple other events, but still it was fascinating.
So, let's take a look at the tempo-adjusted fucks - our FART (Fucks Adjusted For Real Time) rate for this game was 2.110, or essentially a little over 2 fucks per minute of total airtime, and our SHART (Shits Adjusted For Real Time) was 0.325, so we used shit sparingly in this game and went right to fuck. FAP Rate (Fucks Adjusted For Total Plays) comes in at 3.271, or a little over 3 fucks per snap. Both FART and FAP are at their highest levels since 2015 Penn State.
The combined FART / SHART, or SQUIRT, came in at 6.492, which indicates a pretty stressful fuck-filled game, heavy on the fucks compared to shits. The last time it was that high? 2014 Rutgers, bur let's never discuss this game so long as we all shall live, right?
As for the thread itself, across 2,100 replies we had 941 tracked instances, which comes to an overall efficiency rating of 2.23, but as you can see below, when you have a thread that by itself accounts for about 27% of all tracked instances over five games, it's easy to achieve that. Interestingly, all efficiencies so far this year have been in a range between about 2.90 and 2.20, which means we're overall pretty steady-handed about the season so far, I think.
If we look at the Original Six analysis with normalized values, you can see how much Colorado and now Wisconsin stand out as games have gone so far this season.
So, Colorado - heavy on "shit" and "suck", and Wisconsin was heavy on "fuck" and "damn" in comparison to other games. Seems like seasons of old to me. Maybe we 're settling into that familiar pattern of Michigan football stress after all.
Rutgers should be interesting in a different way - perhaps not so stressful this coming week.