The slang board · Jun 22 – Sep 13, 2026 · national

“locked in” is up 27% in a week

Of the 6 pieces of slang this site tracks every day, “locked in” is the one climbing fastest — about 18 mentions a day now across the whole corpus.

Counted every day against a fixed watchlist, so the numbers below are the same measurement week after week — not a list of whatever happened to spike.

What the sport is saying

Each line is that word’s daily mention count across the whole corpus, smoothed over 7 days. A break in a line is a stretch where the word fell below the reporting floor — not a stretch where nobody said it.

“transfer portal”

75 a day now

↓ 18% on the week 7,764 mentions this window Loudest day Aug 20 · 183 mentions

“elite”

92 a day now

↑ 24% on the week 7,019 mentions this window Loudest day Jul 1 · 148 mentions

“natty”

55 a day now

↓ 14% on the week 2,781 mentions this window Loudest day Sep 6 · 135 mentions

“hot seat”

15 a day now

↓ 10% on the week 1,030 mentions this window Loudest day Jul 16 · 48 mentions Measured on 73 of 84 days

“locked in”

18 a day now

↑ 27% on the week 865 mentions this window Loudest day Sep 9 · 32 mentions Measured on 78 of 84 days

“delusional”

13 a day now

↑ 25% on the week 372 mentions this window Loudest day Aug 6 · 24 mentions Measured on 60 of 84 days

Who each word gets said about

These are the programs the sport attaches each word to — every mention that names them, from rival fans and national media as readily as from their own people. Ranked by how far a program over-indexes on a word, not by raw volume, because raw volume just ranks how much a program gets talked about at all. 1.0× is exactly average. Only words where the programs genuinely separate get a board, which is why “transfer portal” and “elite” are missing: everybody says those about everybody.

“hot seat”

The sport reaches for this word about Boston College 2.2 times more than it does about the average FBS program — it is 26% of everything said about them from this watchlist.

# Program Vs. the average program Mentions
1 Boston College 2.2× 32
2 North Carolina 1.8× 88
3 Massachusetts 1.8× 29
4 Wisconsin 1.7× 103
5 Cincinnati 1.6× 54
6 South Carolina 1.6× 135
7 Rutgers 1.5× 47
8 Mississippi State 1.5× 91
9 Florida State 1.4× 136
10 Baylor 1.4× 74
11 SMU 1.4× 52
12 Stanford 1.4× 34
13 USC 1.3× 101
14 Kansas 1.3× 66
15 Arkansas 1.3× 79

64 FBS programs cleared the 25-mention floor for this word.

“natty”

The sport reaches for this word about Clemson 2.0 times more than it does about the average FBS program — it is 14% of everything said about them from this watchlist.

# Program Vs. the average program Mentions
1 Clemson 2.0× 193
2 Georgia 1.7× 239
3 Notre Dame 1.7× 169
4 Nebraska 1.7× 84
5 Ohio State 1.6× 226
6 Oregon 1.6× 166
7 Iowa State 1.5× 51
8 Michigan 1.5× 147
9 Miami 1.5× 158
10 Indiana 1.4× 150
11 Alabama 1.3× 209
12 Texas 1.3× 205
13 LSU 1.1× 133
14 Penn State 1.0× 66
15 Florida 1.0× 112

33 FBS programs cleared the 25-mention floor for this word.

Heat check: what changed this week

Each row is one program against itself: how often the sport used that word about them in the last 7 days, against their own rate over the 28 days before it. Nobody is ranked against anybody else here. 1.0× is a program running at its own usual pace — Sep 7–Sep 13 against Aug 10–Sep 6.

The sport is calling Florida State “natty” 3.0 times as often as it did a month ago — 23 mentions this week against a baseline of 6.2.

# Program Word Vs. its own pace This week Usual week
1 Florida State “natty” 3.0× 23 6.2
2 Wisconsin “natty” 2.5× 12 3.5
3 Minnesota “elite” 2.4× 39 14.5
4 Boise State “elite” 2.2× 15 5.2
5 Utah “elite” 1.9× 33 15.5
6 Kansas “locked in” 1.8× 9 3.5
7 Washington State “elite” 1.8× 9 3.5
8 Michigan “natty” 1.8× 28 14
9 Arizona “locked in” 1.7× 10 4.3
10 Florida State “transfer portal” 1.7× 71 39.8

A program needs 12+ mentions of the word across the baseline before it can qualify, this week’s mentions have to come from at least 5 separate posts or articles, and the multiple is pulled toward 1.0× in proportion to how thin the recent week is — a quiet program cannot post a runaway number off three extra posts. Both count columns are a week’s worth at the measured rate, so they stay comparable when a word drops below the reporting floor for a day.

How this is measured

A fixed watchlist of fan slang is counted every day against the site’s full conversation corpus — Reddit, podcasts, newsletters, video and curated social. The watchlist is closed and editorially governed: new slang is added deliberately, never auto-discovered, so a word’s history is comparable across seasons.

Only football conversation is counted. Several of these sources carry material that has nothing to do with the sport — a campus paper runs the whole paper, a campus subreddit runs housing and parking — and a word like “fraud” or “cooked” means something else entirely there. Documents below the site’s football-relevance threshold are excluded before anything is counted.

A word only appears on this page if it cleared the reporting floor on a real share of the window’s days and carried real volume. Today is excluded from every window, because today’s count is still being collected and would render as a false collapse.

Program boards cover the 2026 season and FBS programs only. A program needs 25+ mentions of a word to be ranked, and the over-index figure is pulled toward average in proportion to how thin the sample is, so a team scraping the floor can’t post a runaway number.

A mention is attributed to a program when the conversation names it — so these are counts of what college football says about a program, which is not the same thing as what that program’s own fans say. Rival fans, national media and podcasts are all in the count. A conversation naming several programs counts for each of them, so per-program counts are not a partition of the national count and must never be summed into one.