Ever wondered how many times people swore online during a popular college football rivalry? Reddit has answered that question. (Seriously.)
The past weekend’s Michigan vs. Michigan State state had one of the wildest endings to a game you’ll ever witness. And over in the extremely popular college football subreddit, one user recorded the amount of cursing that ensued after the improbable ending.
In case you were living under a rock, Michigan was leading the game with 10 seconds left on the clock when the team’s kicker lined up to make a punt. Instead of booting the kick, the low snap was mishandled resulting in a return touchdown for Michigan State:
Social media was made for moments like this and naturally, fans used it to sound off no matter what side of the fence they fall on. This is where Reddit user flashman steps in with his cursing analysis:
After the thrilling finish of the Michigan vs Michigan State match on Sunday, I decided to make a graph of all the times people swore in the live game thread. Data was gathered with PRAW; users were grouped into fans of the two teams by whether their flair text contained ‘Wolverine’ or ‘Spartan’.
This Python pickle file of the thread comments (flattened) will let you play with the full comments if you wish, or you can use this CSV extract with limited fields.
Based off the data collected, fans in the state of Michigan were either REALLY happy or REALLY upset, resulting in the drastic increase of swear words the minute the snap was fumbled.
While it didn’t end favorably for the Harbaugh-led Michigan team, it is further proof why you should NEVER leave a game early when your team is only down by a score.
