Glossary

The NCAA's two Division I football tiers. FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) is the top level — the ~136 programs eligible for the College Football Playoff and major bowls; FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) plays its own smaller-scholarship tier with its own 24-team playoff. This site stores it as teams.level_code (values FBS/FCS/D2/D3) and most site-wide rankings, power ratings, and model outputs are FBS-only.

Shorthand for the two informal tiers inside FBS. P4 ("Power Four") = the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC (plus independent Notre Dame, which this site treats as P4) — the four conferences with the deepest revenue and recruiting bases. G5 ("Group of Five") = every other FBS conference (AAC, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt). Older coverage sometimes says "P5"/"Power Five" — that was accurate before the Pac-12's 2024 collapse folded it down to four; this site's current tier logic (e.g. claim_miner/templates.py) uses P4.

The College Football Playoff — the sport's postseason championship field, expanded to 12 teams starting with the 2024 season. This site's playoff-forecast tooling projects the field and each team's bid odds well before Selection Sunday, tracking movement week to week rather than just a final snapshot.

An external advanced-stats power rating (Bill Connelly / ESPN) that this site displays alongside its own CFB Zeitgeist power rating, FPI, Elo, and SRS in the team-page "Model Consensus" module — a side-by-side read on where the national models agree or disagree with this site's own rank. SP+ itself is not computed by this site; it's ingested and shown for comparison only.

Sportsbooks build a profit margin ("the vig" or "juice") into their posted odds, so raw implied probabilities from both sides of a bet always sum to more than 100%. De-vigging removes that margin — converting American odds to implied probabilities, then rescaling the whole field so it sums to exactly 100% — to get a fair market read. This site's market.py does this (devig_field()) for futures markets like CFP championship odds.

The uncertainty parameter this site's power model uses to convert a predicted point spread into a win probability (p_home = Φ(spread / σ) — a larger σ means a given spread implies a less confident probability). As of the current build it's population-split rather than one flat number: σ = 12.4 when both teams are FBS (the walk-forward Brier-optimal value for FBS-vs-FBS games), σ = 10.0 for any game touching a sub-FBS team (FCS/lower-level blowouts pull the all-games optimum lower).

The site's flagship 0-100 player-season score — one number per player per season describing how good that season was, position-aware, meant to play the same role ESPN's Total QBR plays for quarterbacks but for every offensive skill position. It's built from real-football-unit value (a blend of opponent-adjusted EPA and box-score production, shrunk toward a position mean for small samples) mapped onto a fixed scale where ~50 is a median qualified starter, ~75 is All-Conference caliber, and ~90 is All-America caliber. It is not a career-value ladder or a draft projection, and it is a different number from the team-level "247 Talent Composite" or a player's individual "247 composite" recruiting rating — see those entries below.

How many times more than its own normal rate a word, phrase, or stat is running right now — a 4.1× lift means four times the usual pace, not a raw count and not a share of everything said. It's always a thing compared with its own baseline (a program's own trailing rate, the sport's own trailing rate), never one program's volume stacked against another's. This is the headline number on Words and the Fallout Line.

Every named metric on this site that depends on sample size or data depth ships with a confidence band so the reader knows how much to trust the number, instead of a bare figure with no context. High (blue, ✓) = data comfortably above the calibrated threshold for that metric's domain; medium (gold, •) = normal range; low (gray, ?, shown italic) = thin data — the number is real but preliminary. Below the lowest threshold, the metric is suppressed rather than shown unreliably. Thresholds are recalibrated from the live data distribution, not fixed arbitrarily.

This site's inline honesty tags for AI-assisted editorial copy: a blue ✓ fact tag marks a claim anchored directly to verifiable data (a stat, a result, a recorded quote); a gold ~ our read tag marks the site's own interpretation or synthesis layered on top of that data. The two are styled to never look alike on purpose — the color and glyph both change, not just the wording — so a reader can tell at a glance which parts of a card are sourced and which are editorial judgment.

Recruiting shorthand for a 4-star or 5-star high school prospect (the top two tiers of the standard 5-star scale) — a "blue-chip prospect" or "blue-chip recruit." A program's "blue-chip ratio" (share of roster that arrived as a 4- or 5-star) is a commonly-cited proxy for a program's talent ceiling.

The recruiting industry's aggregated star rating for an individual player — 247Sports' composite of multiple outlets' evaluations, expressed on a roughly 0-to-1 scale (higher is better). This site ingests it via CFBD for both high-school recruits and transfer-portal entrants, and for portal scoring purposes converts it to a 1-to-5 star-equivalent talent score (5-star ≥ 0.98, 4-star 0.90-0.97, 3-star 0.80-0.89, below that 2-star). This is a per-player number — not to be confused with the team-level "Talent Composite" below.

A team-level number, distinct from an individual player's "247 composite" rating above: it's the aggregate 247Sports/On3-style talent ranking of a program's entire roster, shown on team pages as a score plus a national rank. Where "247 composite" grades one recruit or transfer, Talent Composite grades the whole roster's cumulative recruiting investment — and both are different again from the performance-based "CFB Index score," which grades how a player or team actually played, not how they were recruited.

The Transfer Portal Heat Index's ranking metric: talent-weighted portal arrivals minus talent-weighted portal departures for a program over a rolling window. Each transfer's weight comes from their 247 composite rating scaled by a position-value multiplier (quarterbacks and cover corners count for more than running backs, reflecting real positional scarcity research), then decayed by depth — a program's second, third, and Nth transfer at the same position count for progressively less, since a roster can only start one. A positive net Δ means a program's incoming talent outweighs what it lost; the Portal Heat board ranks the whole FBS by this number.

How much of a fanbase's belief about their own team is anchored to a real, citable stat versus vibes — the share of belief-signal conversation that cites a concrete number (a stat, a record, a ranking) rather than pure sentiment. Shown as a label (e.g. "about average") on the team-page belief strip, alongside the raw percentage that cited a stat and the site-wide typical range for comparison. It measures HOW a fanbase believes, not whether that belief is correct.

How much a fanbase's belief about their own team has swung week to week over the last 12 weeks, measured as the standard deviation (σ) of that team's national belief-percentile snapshots. Stable = σ under 8 points (steady belief either way); Reactive = σ 8-18 (belief moves with results); Chaotic = σ over 18 (belief has swung sharply). It describes volatility, not direction — a "Chaotic" fanbase isn't necessarily more negative, just less settled.

This site's read on how confident/skeptical a fanbase's own conversation is about their team right now, distilled from relabeled Reddit/board sentiment into a single directional read (e.g. "the room has gone cold"). It is explicitly modeled opinion, not a counted fact — see the ✓ fact / ~ our read tags above, which govern how it's tagged wherever it appears.

The consensus preseason win total from major sportsbooks for a team's upcoming season — e.g. "9.5" means the market expects roughly 9-10 wins. Shown alongside this site's own model projection so a reader can see where the model and the market agree or diverge; it is a betting-market number, not something this site computes itself.

A team-page module naming the handful of concrete factors (e.g. schedule strength, injury exposure, roster continuity) most likely to determine whether a team over- or under-performs its projection this season — a "what to actually watch for" list, not a prediction of the outcome itself.

This site's shorthand for a fanbase's or a position group's collective conversation — "the room has gone cold" means the surrounding fan discourse has turned negative. It's a narrative device for the aggregated belief signal above, not a literal physical or virtual space.

A short-term court order that preserves the status quo — or, in the eligibility cases this site's off-field coverage tracks, lets a player take the field — until the court can hold a fuller hearing. It is granted quickly, often days after a filing, lasts a limited period, and decides nothing about the merits of the underlying dispute. A TRO is typically the first order in a case, not the last.

A court order issued after a hearing that keeps a rule from being enforced while the case proceeds — longer-lasting and harder to obtain than the TRO above, and normally granted only where the court finds the party asking for it is likely to win and would otherwise suffer harm that money cannot fix. It is still an interim order, and a higher court can stay (pause) it on appeal. Both orders appear in the dockets on Off the Field.

A request asking the NCAA to set aside one of its own eligibility rules for an individual athlete — for example to grant a season back after an injury, a transfer, or time spent at a junior college. It is decided inside the NCAA's own process rather than by a court, and a denied waiver is often what precedes a lawsuit in the cases this site's wire coverage picks up.

The NCAA rule that a player has five calendar years from first enrolling full-time to play four seasons of competition; the clock runs continuously once it starts, whether or not the player is competing. Redshirt seasons, medical hardship years, and time at a junior college all interact with it, and it is the rule at issue in the "fifth year" and "5-for-5" eligibility filings that appear in this site's off-field coverage.

The sum a school owes a head coach or assistant if it terminates the contract without cause before it expires — and, in the reverse direction, what a coach or a hiring school owes to leave early. The figure and its payment schedule are set in the contract itself, which at a public university is generally a public record, and buyout amounts are frequently reported by outlets this site's wire pipeline ingests.

Contacting a player who is under another program's scholarship — or a high-school recruit already committed elsewhere — outside the windows and channels the governing rules allow, rather than through the transfer portal or the permitted recruiting calendar. It is a rules-enforcement term, not a criminal one; accusations are common in public discourse and formal findings are rare, so the site treats an allegation of tampering as an allegation.